Welcome to Zone 14

I can hear the sarcasm in your voice now, dear reader, opening this article for the first time – “oh boy, a blog about football, no one ever talks about football.” Admittedly, the decision to begin a weekly series of articles in perhaps the most saturated journalistic field in the world seems ill-advised. “Surely there’s nothing you can say that hasn’t already been said, what makes this different?” I hear you say. What makes it different indeed.

I’ll start my response to that question by first addressing the title of this blog – Zone 14. Zone 14 has become the fancy way among the data analytics nerds in football to describe the central area just outside of the oppositions box (see the image below). It is, by all statistical accounts, the most dangerous place in football. If you’re attacking it’s the place you want to have the ball, and if you’re defending it’s the most costly place to let your opponent have possession. Even Sean Dyche knows its value.

Credit: Herold et al. (2019)

But of course, everyone intuitively knows about Zone 14. Anyone who has ever played, or watched, the game of football should know that letting your opponent have the ball in the middle of the pitch close to the goal is probably not a winning strategy. Zone 14 is a prime example of the modern complication of football provided by data analytics. Many will scoff at the fact that it even has a name.

So why the focus on it? In short, denoting is as Zone 14 is for precision. It provides a name, and a more concrete boundary, for something that we already know, allowing us then to better understand its impact and importance. Is Zone 14 really that dangerous compared to Zone 13? Only when we have discrete definitions for these places can we start to dig in to its importance.

Creating names for the intuitive is what some people would consider my day job to be as a behavioural – or behavioral, depending on your hemisphere – economics PhD candidate. Behavioural economics (much like data analytics, a very in-vogue field) considers the impact of human psychology on decision making. It was borne out of the work of two seminal psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, seeking to apply findings in psychology to established models of economic thought to see if the conclusions of the traditional models still held. Unsurprisingly, they did not. Researchers then set out to examine to what extent these psychological findings, denoted biases, could impact decision-making.

I describe behavioural economics, and by extension the psychological foundations upon which its built, as intuitive mainly because it seeks to find patterns in the decisions that we make each and every day. For example, the idea of the endowment effect. Simply put, the endowment effect states that owning an item makes it more valuable to you. You would likely charge someone more to sell them an item than you yourself would be willing to pay for that item if the roles were switched. Maybe there’s sentimental value involved, or it would be a pain to go out and try to find a replacement. Intuitive, right? It may be a simple finding, but the endowment effect can help to describe a number of the behaviours that we make in our day-to-day lives, from stock market decisions to not really wanting to share our bar of chocolate. Just like Zone 14, behavioural economics describes the things we already know so we can really begin to understand why it’s the case.

So back to this blog, and what makes it different. Due to my background as a behavioural scientist, I have become accustomed to naming and understanding these principles that in many ways we take for granted. And there’s no field that I pay more attention to than football.

This blog is going to be focused on combining these two interests in a cohesive way. Some weeks it will take findings from behavioural science and try to think about how they may apply to the world of football. In others, I will highlight some things that I think the media has missed. I will try to challenge biases and narratives that exist in football to see whether they live up to scrutiny, as well as trying to understand why the narratives emerged in the first place.

In truth, it may just end up being another blog screaming into the ether about a field that everyone already spends too much of their time following. But if you are interested in looking at football in a different way, or you’re just a little bit curious about how humans think, this is the place for you. To paraphrase a phrase that almost any football manager or data analyst would agree with: if we spend more time in Zone 14, there’s a good chance we’ll end up on top.