Hey, thanks for signing up for the newsletter. Here’s some soccer stuff I’ve been thinking about this week.
The Dyche Zone
Is this a safe place to be honest? I don’t care about set pieces. They’re not soccer. If I had some sick urge to spend my weekends watching clunky, stop-start action where half the passes are incomplete, I’d be a New York Jets fan.
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If I worked for a club, though, I would care about set pieces a lot. Possibly too much. I’d hole up in a log cabin out behind the training ground and scribble a raving, thousand-page manifesto on set pieces. As Ralf Rangnick likes to remind people, dead balls account for 30% of all goals but nowhere near 30% of most teams’ training time. This is sort of weird, right? Here’s your one chance to freeze time, rearrange your players, and run whatever kind of play you want, and everybody’s just like, nah, we’re good.
So you’ve got to admire a team that do set pieces differently — especially when the whole reason their free kicks are more effective than everyone else’s is that they’re not afraid to look dumb.
In general, a free kick taken between a team’s own third and the halfway line — which we’ll call a “deep free kick” — is more or less worthless. There’s a reason you don’t pay attention to fouls in that part of the pitch. Most teams will simply tap the ball sideways and get back to building up as though play never stopped.
Dyche’s teams don’t do that. His Everton, like Burnley before them, treat deep free kicks as an attacking set piece. They’ll use the stoppage of play to push nearly all of their players into a small area near the top of the opponent’s penalty area — call it the Dyche Zone.
Any other club would tap the ball sideways and get back to the business of building up. Not Barnsley. Almost every foul or offside flag outside the defensive third is an excuse for them to stack eight men in a tiny rectangle at the top of the opponent’s box and have a center back or goalkeeper lob an artillery shell into the mixer. Four Tykes charge into the box to stretch the defensive line; four stand ready for a second ball or a chance to counterpress. It’s such a simple, brilliant way to make a mess in the most dangerous part of the field that you sort of wonder why everyone else is doing free kicks wrong.
It’s the measuring part, ultimately, that keeps bringing me back to set pieces. For those of us who think the end goal of analytics ought to be to try to figure out the best way to play soccer, open play can be a place of fear and confusion. Dead balls dumb the game down a little and make it easier to compare similar situations.
The first time I wrote a piece like this, I compared the expected goal outcomes across four possessions after a goal kick and figured, tentatively, that short goal kicks are probably better than long ones. But there were some real concerns. For one thing, the teams that take short goal kicks are better at soccer: their average outcomes over any four possessions will generally be better than the teams that love to kick long. That makes it hard to tell if we’re measuring the value of a tactic or the players that do the tactic.
The beauty of the Dyche Zone is that lumping it long gets better results over the next 30 seconds even though the teams doing it are worse. That’s also true for throwing the ball in the damn box. On stuff like this, I’m a little more confident that there’s a real edge in doing the thing with the better numbers. Besides, wouldn’t it be fun if the smart play turned out to be the ugly, old-fashioned one?
Bad teams go long. Good teams like to play short, retain possession, maintain their shape, move up the field together, stay close to recover lost balls — all things that generally seem to be a good idea in open play. But if you apply the same thinking to certain kinds of set pieces, maybe you wind up taking unnecessary risks when you ought to just use the stoppage to put all your bodies and the ball in the place where goals happen.
The ideology of Football Manager
For the last year or so, my buddy Tiotal Football and I have been doing an occasional podcast called Post Script on the history of analytics and tactics blogs (officially, “how the internet changed soccer analysis”). We’ve covered everything from Ian Graham’s secret pre-Liverpool history as an analytics blogger to Pep Guardiola’s slightly less secret pre-Barcelona history as a tactics blogger.
But there’s one old blog we both love, Brian Phillips’ Run of Play, that we couldn’t really figure out how to shoehorn into our story. It was nerdy, yeah, but less in a numbers and arrows sort of way than, like, soccer for people who read Infinite Jest in the bleachers.
This week we found a way. In between beautifully written essays on the metaphysics of Pelé or whatever, Phillips kept up a long-running series about his Football Manager team, Pro Vercelli. Tiotal and I read those posts to talk about a video game I’ve never played but which — as a couple of listeners pointed out — has been a massive, possibly underexamined force in the soccer nerd world.
aka the Allardyce Area