Our intuitive understanding of space in football

The semantic structure "Football is a simple game" can singularly act as the first of the two fundamental structural elements of a joke: a set-up. 

The punchline may then be a creative input of anyone's frontal lobe function — a part of the brain associated with creativity — in which case it's the corresponding independent clause: "... It comes down to who wants it (the ball, the 1v1 duels, the victory) more?" Or something more authentic, like Atalanta midfielder Maten De Roon's tweet, "... Bloody Ronaldo" with reference to the Portuguese late equaliser against his own team.

But, of course, as with any joke, its comical quality is restricted to a particular type of audience. To achieve universal humour is to rig the human consciousness. 

De Roon, for instance, plays for an Atalanta side under the tutelage of Gian Piero Gasperini that, by virtue of tactical sophistication, engages in preternatural wide attacking plays. It entails deserting the most-prized (centre) areas of the pitch. Or as my friend Uddhav put it to me, "Most teams' attack ends when the ball goes wide, whereas Atalanta's starts when the ball goes wide," succinctly capturing the paradoxical nature of the Italian team's playing philosophy. 

As such, it makes sense that De Roon finds the idea amusing. He hails from a place where tactics, "The sum of communication and decision-making of the players supported and advised by the coach and their staff in order to streamline and enhance its efficiency on a team level" (Rene Maric), are celebrated for its floor-raising quality. And not frowned upon, or seen as an existential threat to the humanistic culture of the ball game, or their democratic values, like freedom.  

For context, the wing zones are traditionally understood to be low-threat locations, among other things, owing to their susceptibility to the defending concept "touchline as an extra player" and their inherent limitations in terms of visual view and directions — in the abstract, a player can only play the ball from five directions (forward, backward, left, right, and two diagonal lines) while occupying the area — compared to other vertical lanes, e.g., the half-spaces, or halbraum in German.

To others, however, who had been indoctrinated in a more simplistic version of the beautiful game; the spirit of laissez-faire reminiscent of Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's time at Manchester United, or Real Madrid's famous Champions League three-peat under Zinedine Zidane, the notion that football is uncomplicated is anything but derision. It's their truth. 

And for someone, who gives the impression that football is played on spreadsheets or a nerd who's never kicked a football — or one who, in fact, did but not very well — to impugn their perception of reality formed by many years of training sessions and game plans, is unacceptable, and the natural reaction is one of outrage. A wounded ego retaliates. 

Contrary to popular belief, age, unlike it's often made out to be in the stereotypical depictions of this ideological war, is rarely the determining factor. 

While this may not be the most appropriate example — a look at cultural anthropology relating to footballing philosophies in the past decades will help to contextualise it — 19 years (one short of a generation) separate Helmut Groß and Tim Sherwood. (We adore you, Tim.)

• The Two Types of Space: positional play

By now, reading another article on Juego di Posicion would lull you to boredom. At best, scrolling mindlessly, eyes fixated on the screen yet assimilating very little; at worst, a grudging exit from the page spurred by the distaste for monotony. 

It's not a stretch to say that virtually all there's to be written about the in-possession philosophy, with crucially, a residue of authenticity, has been written, and there are cringe-worthy examples of when its scope has been hyperbolized beyond practical application. I.e., the formulation of training exercises to implement the ideas loosely based on a theoretical framework. 

One that comes to mind is the popular belief that bore its roots in the Spanish and South American football schools: "attack and defence are the same." Technically, it's simply not.

A game model accounts for principles and sub-principles that guide team behaviour across the eight phases of play (out of ten, the other two being attacking and defending set-pieces). In possession; build-up play, progression phase, and creation phase. Out of possession; high block, medium block, and low block.

This means that theoretically, each phase has its own unique commandments by which they're sometimes anatomized in opposition analysis — although they shouldn't be thought of as one-way traffic; concepts such as "negative passes" and "defensive possession" are like ironies. That can be further broken down into in-game situations for specific opponents depending on their structural elements (for example, build-up shapes differ in their angles for ball reception and support), patterns of play (it could be a rotation that places an intelligent runner in a forward-facing position), or the qualitative (physical, technical or tactical) and socio-affective superiorities (some players share a special connection) may exist. 

The oversimplified view withers away when encountered with the complexity of practicable knowledge, a departure from conceptual thinking. And this doesn't run counter to the consensus that football is fluid, and is at times, a beautiful mess — but is rather complementary. "Football is a sport you play with the most disobedient part of the body," Juanma Lillo explained as he casually went granular, "the foot." 

The appropriate response to this then, to borrow a term Ralf Rangnick coined while maintaining a stoic posture during his presentation as Manchester United interim manager — which also articulates the thoughts of most coaches when crafting a game model — is to "reduce the coincidence factor." Football is already chaotic as it is; the "disobedient foot''; the "uncertainty principle" applicable to the second balls; disorganised defences in transition moments; the second phase of set pieces. 

To deviate a little, this prospect of a soulless tactician, who is greedy of control over his own fate, only being willing to green-light the absolute minimum of randomness is infinitely boring to the fans. The deprivation of a growing sense of expectation that's necessary to keep them engaged. There's no rising action. Conflict. It's a broad answer to the romantic disillusions suffered by some observers of Manchester City's matches in the last two seasons. And it can be likened to a movie: the viewers want to see the protagonist experience everything and nothing without having to experience those things themselves — needless to say, the protagonist wouldn't voluntarily go through the acts (climax, anti-climax, resolution) for our own delight if they had free will, and their destiny wasn't preordained. 

Having said that — appertaining to the point made in the penultimate paragraph — with some latitude, it could be argued that the concept (attack and defence are one) specifically applies to the dynamics that co-occur in the possession phase and the attack-defence transition (two distinct but related phases). It's the essence of rest-defence. 

For the simple reason that the way in which the in-possession team is structured to curb defensive transitions (on a basic level, "how much width do I use in the positional attack?") can act as a "sufficient cause" (numerical imbalance and the lack of local compactness are unforgivable sins, as are defensive vices like "jumping" versus "delaying") of the penetrative opportunities that ensue under those conditions, and as for the opposition who we assume will transition to attack, a relatively new term coinciding with the evolution of counter-attacks: rest attack. 

What's deeply engrossing about Positional play, though, apart from the correlation between its usage and success in some notable cases (Pep Guardiola's impassioned rendition of My Way) that transcends aesthetic value, is that it's open to many interpretations. There is a myriad of ways to think about it, allowing a neural pathway for imagination. 

One of the most prominent concepts, next to the partition of the football field into five vertical corridors, is the division of space around the ball-carrier into three categories based on locality and the on-ball, as well as off-ball actions of their teammates in possession: (1) Zone of cooperation, (2) Mutual help space, and (3) Zone of intervention. 

A visual representation of the zones from Roshan Rao:

https://twitter.com/roshanrao_/status/1464512613467967490?t=EbOg9-llRU9XOIy9stPrfg&s=19

But a lesser-known theory of the Position game, which may serve to simplify our understanding of space, is that there are two types of space primarily in settled possession. The "Rival space" is the space the defending team willfully cedes based on their interpretation of the compactness and coverage conundrum. To use an illustration, a mid-block strategy may include a decidedly ball-side orientation, with a focus on caving the opposition in on the effective playing space and denying access to the possible actors responsible for a switch of play.

Note: although the screen grab (central compactness) and the example used (ball-orientation) do not correlate in a technical sense, the thesis holds. A team's interpretation of the conundrum could be either of these strategies, a hybrid in the final third where constraints on crosses are relatively relaxed on the grounds that the defenders will deal with it, or a different reference point altogether for defending, e.g., Marcelo Bielsa's Leeds (man).

In this instance, the rival space is the far side - they consider it to be of lesser importance, hence it's temporarily uninhabited. From a defensive viewpoint, a calculated trade-off after finding some degree of middleweight is necessary for any form of spatial control. 

"So what is defending?" The late Johan Cruyff asked as a rhetorical question in an interview. "Defending is a matter of how much space I should defend. If I have to entirely defend that garden, I'm the worst. If I only have to defend that piece, I'm the best — everything has to do with metres."

A preferential analogue to the rival space, on the other hand, is the space that the attacking team effectuates through their spatial occupation and ball circulation. The main idea here is the creation of space in that the aforementioned space is generally not created (it's available at the moment, at least), but occupied (maximum, minimum, double or single width in the zone of cooperation) or attacked (via deep and third man runs or a concept known as "dynamic occupation" in a 4-2-2-2 configuration) — the two other ways of influencing space.

This occurs when, say, a ball-oriented defensive structure — to refer to an earlier example — shifts across to the side where the ball is, to stifle any attempts by the opposition to threaten the solidity of their shape either by forcing a turnover, or driving them back to less threatening positions and failing to achieve that. 

Instead, the in-possession team overloads the playing area (preferably the half-spaces) which the defending team had prioritised in order to invalidate whichever type of compactness they exercise (usually diagonal), or the sub-principles of their block (medium or low) and consolidate possession. A natural progression from there would be to create and subsequently access the "indefensible space." Which, by definition, fits the hallmarks of the second type of space. 

At this point, it becomes clear that the mechanisms for utilising the rival space and the self-created space after it's been generated (the process itself requires a different toolbox) are markedly different. 

Think Manchester City's chance creation methods against PSG in their most recent fixture. To compensate for his front trio's disinclination to participate in defensive actions, Mauricio Pochettino assembled his team to defend with a narrow 4-4-2 (in practice, it was a lopsided 4-3-3) emphasising the collective need to secure central compactness. And one part of City's game plan was to repeatedly — but not aimlessly, its frequency was informed by variables like space, time, position and speed (the block can reposition itself) — play long switches of play (specific types of passes requiring different techniques that increased the tempo) to the wingers, with the interiors (Gundogan especially) strategically positioning themselves in and around the opposite half-space to aid in their isolation. 

This was done to exploit the space in the outer corridor, or the rival space to be more precise. Space is abstract. Space is not independent. What wouldn't be the "rival space" in the last example turns into the relevant space as a result of the change in the determining factor: the defending team's orientation. PSG's strategies in defensive organisation revolved around consolidating their access to the central areas, at the expense of temporarily leaving the wide areas unmanned. The main reference point continued to be "space," not the ball. 

Contrast this with a hypothetical situation where PSG, having subscribed to retaining spatial domination in the central space, are continually being pulled apart in the said playing area. First, for this to play out, considering PSG are actively containing this territory, the attacking team would have to neutralise their compactness using their own methodology, with an eye to generating the much-desired space ultimately. And whereas in the former case, City would try to achieve this objective via speed of play and the occupation of strategic positions, this scenario asks of them to be a bit more measured to fulfil an integral part of the procedure: the attraction of opposing players, and the resultant abandonment of their positions. 

The viability of some principles is peculiar to the conditions they're exposed to — hence the argument for tactical flexibility — and our subjective labelling of space guided by a more practical indicator, that is, orientation, is somewhat reflective of this sentiment.