THE ZONE 14 IN MODERN FOOTBALL/SOCCER.

 Author: Oscar Mendez.

For over a decade and a half, when I arrived to Europe, one of the things that I heard about and surprised me was the concept of the "Square or Space N.14" from the British School of Football Coaches. 

Before, the pitch used to be divided in 18 even  spaces, these spaces would be 18 even squares.

By doing this, our team strategically would try to generate or not allow our opponent (depending if we were attacking or defending), to generate superiorities inside this space or square, either by attracting or moving  the opponent's defensive midfielders or trying to attract defenders in another space freeing another player of ours  to this space where he/she could receive the ball without being marked.

This space would have special relevance since "if our team would generate a mismatch or unbalance in this zone, we could easily create scoring chances because the distance from the goal is very short and would not allow the opponent to organize itself or execute defensive covers due to the short time".

We will find our players facing the back line, whether of 3,4, or 5 defenders but were in a zone which is crucial thanks to game analytics, now we know that scoring chances have a higher chance of being scored.

This way, we could easily create an unbalance on the central defenders many times being on 1v1 situations or sometimes even on situations of numerical superiority.

If we played with 2 forwards, one would be the one in charge of occupying the central defenders while the other would drop to receive in that zone.

I personally remember the Colombian National Team of Francisco "Pacho" Maturana in the 90's do this over and over with relative success.

Generally this problem would occur because the defensive midfielder/s of our opponent would defend on straight line, not moving diagonally and the central defenders, due to a problem of zonal priority, would remain in their space or zone and the space would be generated because they were busy with the striker or center forward.

We would in most cases, try to attract the defensive midfielders and move them, to pass balls through to one of our players where he/she  would be able to receive passes and create scoring chances with high probability of being scored. 

This could be done with an offensive midfielder, another Forward or a winger who would  go towards this zone to receive freely or unmarked.

As we see, this is another of many concepts and reasons why modern football/soccer has evolved these past years and now it is much more tactical and sophisticated than years before, but many people still try to ignore this and state that the sport is still the same...

These past years, I have heard and seen it mentioned by Pep Guardiola even though I really do not know if it was him who invented this, that began talking about the pitch being divided into 30 spaces, where the zone N.14 still has a great relevance but its distribution has changed due to a new partition where the spaces N.22, 23 and 24 occupy this space.

As we can see, the number now has changed even though the concept and the essence has not.

We still have the same idea and concept even though now this space is occupied by three spaces , all placed in the same zone, trying to obtain the same result.

One of the objectives of Mourinho's Tottenham on the Offensive Organization this season, is to attract through slow and low risk  possessions in this zone so that one of the wingers, normally on weak side, occupy this zone and generate chaos on the opponents defensive side.

 Reasons why this zone is so important:

If we are able to find a free teammate in this zone and receives the ball without being pressured, at least he is going to create numerical equality or even superiority in a zone, that now thanks to game analytics we know is extremely important due to the percentage of scoring it has.

The distance to the goal is very short, this would not give enough time for the defending team to organize or execute defensive covers.

We can use this zone to attract defenders and penetrate through the half spaces next to zone N.23 (N.22 and N.24).

It is extremely important also that our team learns not to lose the ball in these zones due to what we mentioned above.

"Cryuff's legacy is infinite".

Pep Guardiola.

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