Football is not an art gallery, or a fashion show, though it's hard to dismiss Arne Slot's point that Premier League football has become something other than filled with beauty.
The Liverpool boss' assessment that games are "not a joy to watch" and have an emphasis on set pieces is a harsh take on reality.
Opponents of Liverpool, which is pretty much everyone not a Liverpool fan, will scoff at the fact Slot's side needed corners to get past Wolves on the weekend.
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But that's beside the point. Slot is a football fan at heart. So when he says the game for the neutral has changed, it's worth listening to. His assessment is not worthy of dismissal.
Goals from set pieces this season in the Premier League have risen as sharply as oil prices. Some games resemble NFL, where time is taken between downs to make sure all the chess pieces are in place for one strike play.
Take Sunday's London derby as a prime example. Arsenal defeated Chelsea two converted corners to one.
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The league leaders only won five corners, but every time they did, the Emirates erupted. Joy for them, is the prospect of a corner, and given their ability at converting them into goals, why not.
I went back and timed all 15 corners from the game. On average, 46 seconds were needed to take a corner. There was one long throw taken by Declan Rice, late in the first half. That also took 46 seconds to organise.
The game went 99 minutes. Over 11 minutes were chewed up by teams organising themselves for a corner. Arsenal's first goal was from a corner that took 65 seconds to take. Chelsea's goal was from a corner that took 58 seconds.
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Every player in the box positioned themselves for a role to block, hold or run.
They only could because they had time to, much like an NFL team setting up for 3rd & 6.
Here's where the Premier League, with some help from IFAB (the rules committee who are in the mood to change rules for fun at the moment) can peel back the need for corners to take over a minute to set up.
Have a time limit! Thirty seconds to take a corner. Communication from the VAR room can help count.
Such a rule would have found an extra four minutes of play during Arsenal-Chelsea.
No guarantee it would turn the game into a free-flowing thing of beauty, but more chance of fatigue, more chance of something worthy of a highlight that still gets played in a decade.
Football's great strength is that it is a game based on skill, over physicality.
Yes, that has been morphed as the game has evolved.
It is no shock that the nine English teams to start in European competitions this season are still in those competitions. There is a real chance of an English Champions-Europa-Conference League clean sweep.
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Through the league phases of those competitions, continental teams, as a whole, just couldn't cope with the power output of Premier League opposition.
Yet when those two forces meet now, margins are so thin, set pieces have become highly valued controllables. But waiting for nearly a minute for 18 blokes to wrestle at a corner is not football.
Undo it. Bring some joy back.
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