Whats so special about the half-spaces? (With help from Rene Maric)

Back in 2014, Rene Maric was a football tactics blogger training a team of amateurs when he got curious about a geometry he’d come across in coaching circles. Managers like Jurgen Klopp and Ralf Rangnick didn’t just divide the pitch into vertical halves or thirds. They talked about five horizontal zones running the length of the field, like the ones Pep Guardiola chalked on his training pitch at Bayern Munich to help guide players’ spacing and movement.

The outside zones were easy to name; those were the wings. The middle was the middle. Germans had a specific term for the two bands in between: halbraum, or “half-spaces”. Maric admitted it was “not a good word” in English, but for lack of any better ideas, the name stuck.

He wrote a long post for Spielverlagerung on what made these two extra zones worth paying attention to. It’s worth reading the whole thing, but the gist is that the half-spaces combine the advantage of the centre — getting away from the sideline, where movement is limited, and closer to goal — with a natural angle that helps spatial awareness and encourages dangerous diagonal passes. Maric was especially interested in how the half-spaces could be strategically useful in dragging defences out of position.

The article was just a way to hash out some nerdy tactics theory with his friends, but it caught fire. Seven years later it’s hard to find a tactics diagram that doesn’t split the pitch into horizontal fifths, and Maric, whose blogging caught the attention of Thomas Tuchel and Marco Rose, is an assistant manager at Borussia Dortmund. You’ll sometimes even hear commentators talk about half-spaces during a broadcast.

Last week I called Maric with an idea: What if we revisited that old article to see if some of the tactical virtues of half-spaces show up in the data? He was quick to downplay his own work (“people are taking it too seriously, to be honest”) but intrigued enough to play along.

“I can see that you will debunk every hypothesis I wrote,” he laughed.

Let’s start with what the half-spaces are not.

For one thing, they’re not the channels. People sometimes get mixed up about this. “Channels” are also horizontal zones, but they describe the gaps between defenders, so their size and location depend on where players are positioned. The half-spaces are fixed zones — two imaginary rectangles on a pitch.

Coaches often set the half-spaces’ width using the outside edges of the six-yard-box and penalty area as visual reference points, but for the sake of comparable measurements in this article we’ll use even fifths and cut off the ends at the top of each box. Maric isn’t too picky. “A half-space is just a visualisation,” he said. “It’s a tool, like formations are a tool.”

For all their theoretical advantages, the half-spaces are not magic. In many cases, football data sorts on a continuum from the centre to the wings, with the half-spaces falling where you might expect: in between. For metrics like tackle success rates, pass distances, or vertical yards per carry, the half-spaces split the difference between the centre and the wings.

But when it comes to how teams progress the ball, you can start to see why coaches love the half-spaces so much.

Each half-space accounts for 22 per cent of all open-play passes that move the ball forward — more than any other zone. That’s partly thanks to sheer availability. On a per-touch basis, passes from the middle of the pitch, where the ball carrier has maximum freedom, are more valuable. They gain more ground on average (6.9 vertical yards in the centre to the half-spaces’ 5.6), are more likely to go forward (72 per cent of all attempts compared to 66 per cent in the half-spaces) and are more likely to be successful when they do (79.5 per cent completion rate on forward passes to 77.6 per cent). But defences do their best to deny that valuable space. “The opponent has to close the centre. That’s everyone’s main idea,” Maric said. Instead, teams in possession gobble up territory from the next-best part of the field, the half-spaces.

That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re passing straight ahead. Maric’s blog post rhapsodised about the half-spaces’ intrinsic “diagonality”. A player facing goal there naturally opens his body to see in front of and behind him at the same time (just as Maric predicted when we chatted, this leads to fewer miscontrols or dispossessions per pass in the half-spaces than in the middle or the wings). More importantly, that orientation gives the ball carrier both a short, safe outlet to the wing and full view of any diagonal passing options into the heart of the defence. “A lot of coaches in Germany are big on diagonality,” Maric said, and you can see why below.

These visualisations, called pass sonars, use length to show how often players in each zone of the attacking half pass at a given angle. The most common angles are inward passes from the wings (which makes sense, since it’s generally inadvisable to pass outward from there). But there are also a lot of passes aimed diagonally forward in both directions from the half-spaces. That’s how teams are getting the ball upfield.

Now look at the segments highlighted in red. On a per-pass basis, these angles are most likely to be part of a possession that scored a goal. Not surprisingly, any kind of forward pass in the middle is a good thing. But diagonal passes from the half-spaces — both into the middle and sometimes out to the wing — are also dangerous, and they’re easier to create.

Maybe it’ll help to see these concepts play out on the pitch. Here’s City’s second goal from the Manchester derby a couple of weeks ago. Bernardo Silva has just hit a short switch from the right half-space to Joao Cancelo waiting in the left one. As Cancelo squares up against a scrambling defence, Silva sneaks in behind Luke Shaw at the far post to tap the cross home.

There are good reasons why this play is so hard to defend. Cancelo’s diagonal orientation before he receives the ball gives him a good view of all five runners in the box, from Gabriel Jesus making the near-side seam run to Silva cutting in at the back post. The half-space-to-half-space switch before the cross is just the right length to move the ball efficiently to the defence’s blindside without giving them time to recover. And Cancelo’s killer final pass cuts both across and beyond the back line, making it especially difficult to track. “A diagonal pass causes the opponent to make a more complex movement than is the case from horizontal and vertical passes,” Maric’s article explains. Too complex, as it turned out, for Shaw and company.

Maric gets most animated when he talks about how the half-spaces can help disorganise the defence. He offered an example from his Dortmund day job. “Mats Hummels is very good at penetrating as a centre-back,” he said. “He dribbles in the half-space and the opponent comes to him. When he plays to the wing, five meters, there will be a lot of pressure and we rarely are able to progress that way. If he plays to the centre, it will be very narrow. But if he plays to the other half-space, it will be very dangerous for the opposition.”

Instead of waiting for the ball in the closely guarded middle, Maric likes for players to work the half-spaces, draw the opponent out, and then slip into that valuable central space. “Do I occupy the middle, or do I open it by being in the half-spaces and then, when the opponent closes down, attack the middle dynamically?” he said. “That’s a discussion that happened in chess 100 years ago with the hypermodern school.”

This kind of strategy can be hard to measure with event data, which can’t see what’s happening off the ball, but at least one of Maric’s game theory ideas has some high-profile support. The blog post talks about the spatial dilemmas that narrow wingers and a dropping centre forward in the half-space can cause for centre-backs. In the last few seasons of the Premier League, no striker has drifted into the half-spaces to receive the ball more often than Roberto Firmino. Probably not coincidentally, no wingers have scored more goals than Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mane.

Maric has first-hand experience with how the half-spaces can rip a defence apart. He vividly remembered Ilkay Gundogan doing it in a Champions League demolition of Borussia Monchengladbach, where he and Rose coached last season. “That was the perfect visualization of what I meant seven years before,” he said. “Pity I was sitting on the wrong bench.”

#UCL @ManCityFra a joué les patrons en 8es de finale 👊

Est-ce la bonne année pour les Cityzens 🤔#LdC #ChampionsLeague #City pic.twitter.com/DiXt0UITDa

— L'UEFA 🇫🇷 (@UEFAcom_fr) March 20, 2021

It probably won’t shock you that Manchester City, where Guardiola still draws the half-spaces on his training pitch, take more of their touches in those zones than any other team in England, with Rodri leading the league’s midfielders for half-space touches. They’re followed by the rest of the Big Six along with Southampton, whose manager, Ralph Hasenhuttl, probably knows a thing or two about halbraum theory. Interestingly, the relationship between spending and centrality is less pronounced in the middle fifth, where City ranks seventh for touch share, between Villa and Norwich. For some reason, money seems to particularly love the half-spaces.

Despite all the theory and data, Maric knows the half-spaces are only a teaching tool; a way of talking about the game. Players were using these parts of the pitch before anybody came up with fancy German jargon for them. “Sir Alex Ferguson didn’t need the half-spaces term to have a better grasp of what to tell his players and what to do with them than I do,” he said.

“Football is a very easy game. It may sometimes sound more complicated than it is,” Maric added, “especially if you read my articles…”

(Design: Sam Richardson)

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Whats so special about the half-spaces? (With help from Rene Maric)