World Cup: Can you tell a country by its corner kicks?

NEW YORK – Mexico did not seem to see it coming. As he stood by the corner flag, Argentina’s Rodrigo de Paul thought about slinging the ball into the penalty area, but then decided against it. Instead, he went short, clipping a gentle ball to Lionel Messi. Perhaps Mexico, at that point, thought Argentina were conserving possession, protecting their slender lead.

Messi had other ideas. He eschewed the cross, too, choosing another short pass, this time to Enzo Fernandez, on the edge of the penalty area. Fernandez shimmied once, twice, and then sent a shot on a perfect parabola that took the ball beyond the reach of Mexico’s goalkeeper.

The goal sealed Argentina’s win and – eventually – Mexico’s fate at this World Cup.

At first glance, it seemed like the sort of goal that Mexico had been powerless to stop – a moment of magic, a bolt from the blue. If anything, though, Stuart Reid would have deemed it eminently predictable. This is Argentina, after all. And Argentina, as Reid has established, like their corners just as they like their No. 10s – short.

There is a good chance that Reid has watched more corner kicks than anyone else on the planet. As a rule, he watches hundreds of corners a day. In fact, he annotates and assesses and assiduously catalogues them. Over the years, he has built an unrivalled database of corners in an attempt to establish what makes some work and some fail, and to find ways to tilt the balance from the latter to the former.

He has polished his expertise sufficiently to turn what was, at first, an (extremely) niche hobby into a career. A consultant employed by clubs around the world, Reid’s job is to guide teams’ strategy on set pieces – corner kicks, free kicks and other dead-ball situations – by advising their coaches on general principles and offering advice on how to deal with specific opponents. He is conscious that he is an outsider; in an interview last month, he made it clear he is there to assist, rather than direct.

The more corners he has dissected, though, the more he realised something. Football is now a resolutely globalised game.

Ideas spread around the world in the blink of an eye, transmitted almost instantaneously along well-worn trade routes. And yet one area remains relatively untouched, and still proudly, defiantly local. Reid can, sometimes, tell where a team are from just from the way they attack or defend their corner kicks.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to defend corner kicks. The more traditional approach is to turn them into a one-on-one contest, assigning each defender an individual attacker to track – what is known as man-to-man marking. The other approach is more territorial – a defender will be told to patrol a specific area of the penalty box, and to clear any danger that arrives in their zone. This is known as zonal marking.

It is standard, now, for teams to use a mix of the two, but some countries remain fiercely loyal to either. Brazil, for example, lean unusually heavily on zonal marking. Reid’s research has found that some sides, including Brazil’s national team, often deploy as many as six zonal markers.

What makes the Brazilian way unique, though, is how the players defend.

“It’s curious how aggressively teams in Brazil defend corners in which the ball swings away from the goalkeeper,” Reid said. “The players defending the central parts of the penalty area stand much further away from the goal than they do in Europe.”

Naturally, the way Brazil approach corners is the polar opposite of what Argentina do. South America’s two great powers are divided by almost everything, after all, and the way they approach set pieces is no different. Argentinian teams take a much more individual set-up, relying largely on man-marking.

Portugal and the Netherlands have contrasting approaches to defending corner kicks. For the Portuguese, strength very clearly lies in numbers, at least in defence. The country’s whole attacking system might be set up with an individual at its heart – Cristiano Ronaldo – but at the other end of the field it expects everyone to share the burden. It is not just that Portuguese football prefers zonal marking. It is that Portugal really, really likes zonal marking. “They are,” Reid said, “big fans.”

It is more surprising to discover that the Netherlands functions as a sort of inverse Portugal. This is the country, after all, where Total Football first flowered, a system of play in which everyone was allowed, and even encouraged, to do everything. When it comes to defending, though, the Netherlands are very much of the mind that players should sort out their own problems.

Dutch teams, in general, turn corners into individual battles, Reid said. “The most popular system in the Dutch league has every opposition player marked,” he said.

That is even more pronounced with the national team, which often has just two players marking zonally – the ones standing on each post. It is, he believes, a weak point. “The lack of central cover could be an issue,” he said. “The area between the penalty spot and six-yard area is quite open.”

Corners are not, at heart, an especially efficient way of scoring goals. Some studies have suggested that one of every nine corners actually leads to a chance to score, let alone to a goal.

That can be interpreted two ways – many teams, now, are seeking ways to shave the odds in their favour. Teams like Spain, on the other hand, have taken the opposite lesson – increasingly, they have turned their back on corners entirely.

Spain, as a rule, does not like the traditional corner. For a football culture that cherishes possession of the ball more than almost any other, swinging a cross into the box is too much of a gamble.

Spanish clubs in general and the national team in particular use corners not as a chance to win the lottery, but as an opportunity to retain possession, to start again. “Last season, there were more short corners in La Liga than any of Europe’s other major leagues,” Reid said.

It is, for Spain as for so many others, a chance to show who they really are. NYTIMES