Building capacity and breaking lines

Over the years, I’ve met a lot of people working in football from around the globe. The nature of this industry is mobile, international, insecure, and ever-changing - my thoughts have been with those of you affected by the many life-altering circumstances that have been taking place around the world recently.

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Every now and then, an idea just sticks with you. Most often it’s not so much the idea itself, but the way the idea is phrased. After all, people tend to echo the ideas that others have had before them, but it can sometimes be hard for a thought to take root until the right seed is sown.

‘Building capacity’ was one of these for me. It’s a phrase of long-time friend-of-the-newsletter Tiotal Football (of Absolute Unit and the Post-Script podcast). The phrase referred to the way that teams act in possession, a subtle difference to usual terms like ‘ball progression’ or ‘build-up’. We’ll get to the difference in a second.

First, the thought had to flower. It had latched, roots don’t make a fruit. (even if you can get some useful tubers). At some point, Tiotal also made a comment about cut-backs being so effective as goal-creation chances partly because they give the defending team a particular set of bad choices. It’s like the Rafael Benitez ‘short blanket’ metaphor for tactics in miniature.

‘Building capacity’ is shuffling things towards forcing these bad choices on your opponents. If cut-backs are the ‘fork’ - to play to the readerbase and use a bit of chess lingo - then building capacity is the move before the move to create the fork.

The idea of ‘build-up’, ‘ball progression’, and particularly ‘building through the thirds’ had always jarred slightly. It’s true that moving the ball closer to goal helps create chances, but how often do you see a team progress the ball through the thirds, establish possession high up-field and then… just be faced with a robust, structured defence. Ball progression is often relatively easy until you hit the point that the out-of-possession team is actually bothered about defending. Sometimes a mid block is more of a negotiation tactic than anything.

Building capacity will often mean that the ball moves forwards, but it ball progression doesn’t mean that the capacity has been built.

Neither, necessarily, does breaking a line.

I’ll grant you, breaking a line is better than breaking most things. It’s definitely way, way better to be a line-breaker than a heart-breaker, leg-breaker, strike-breaker. However, a pass that breaks a line is not necessarily ‘building capacity’. You could put together incredible highlight reels of players breaking the first line of an opposition block, which the opponent immediately recovers from, or breaking a midfield line to a teammate facing away from goal with no passing options.

A sidenote: a focus on breaking lines with passes de-emphasises the ability of ball-carrying to shake up an opponent. We need more centre-backs maraudering and gallivanting. 

The problem with ‘building capacity’ is that it’s difficult to count. But culturally we seem to be swinging back towards valuing expertise instead of just wanting easy-to-grasp simplism, so maybe that’s not a deal-breaker.

Tracking data might come sweeping in here claiming to save the day. There are already companies like [no, I’m not giving free advertising] who have models calculating both the likelihood of pass completion and the pitch value of the potential receiver. You could imagine a step further than this, some way of factoring in immediate options that the receiver would have if they received a pass.

Could thinking about ‘building capacity’ (or ‘building bad options for the opponent’) help make modelling choices easier? Let’s take backwards passes (the anti-line-breaker). Analytics people have often argued that backwards passes aren’t necessarily ‘bad’, because they could be the pass which opens up a progressive pass. This fits in the framework of ‘building capacity’. But they can also be valuable for removing risk of a turnover, which is a ‘bad option’ that the opponent is trying to force on the in-possession team. Although the quality of options might still be assessed in a goals-derived metric, you’re dealing with a much larger bunch of ‘rewards’ than if you’re looking at goal-creation directly.

Sometimes the better option might not be taking a pawn, not even waiting for an opportunity to take the queen, but starting with a fork on the bishop and rook.