Tactical explainer: Taking advantage of defensive line imbalances
When a team's defensive line leaves space and are exposed, being able to exploit these gaps is a crucial skill and trait of an attacking player. In this latest article in the Kognia Tactical Explainer series, we further explore this Kognia tactical metric, and use last season's Premier League as a case study to further assess and understand its impact when it comes to evaluating the impact and behaviour of forward players.
Definition: Offensive players without the ball who are positioned inside the imbalance area of the defensive line.
Coach's words: "When their back line gets out of shape and a gap opens up, who's the player that's already standing in it, waiting for the ball, before we've even played the pass? That's the one who's already won the next move before it happens."
So what? Kognia records the exact moment and place on the pitch where a player steps into that gap left by the defensive line, whether or not the ball ever reaches them. That means you can measure a player's positioning and anticipation on their own, separately from their finishing or their passing. Two attackers might create the exact same number of clear chances, but this metric tells you which of them is doing it by consistently reading the defence and getting into the right space early, rather than just being lucky with service. That's valuable both when you're scouting a player and when you're building a plan to stop a specific opponent's back line.
Case study: 2025/26 Premier League
Across the 2025/26 Premier League season, we logged 99,389 detections from 210 qualifying forwards. This section of the article addresses whether exploiting these defensive line imbalances more often actually convert into more shots and goals?
Who exploits imbalances most?
The table ranks forwards by raw season volume, which led by Brentford's Thiago Rodriguez.
Identifying the instances is one thing, but the more important application comes from understanding what happened from these possessions.
What those possessions become
To understand the impact of these moments for the league's eight most active forwards, we tracked whether each attack went on to produce a shot or goal. In these instances, each possession counts once per player regardless of how many times the detection re-triggered inside it.
Pooled across the cohort, 10.7% of imbalance possessions end in an open-play shot and 1.2% in a goal. Frequency buys no conversion premium within this group (r = 0.20, n = 8, descriptive).
We can see that Thiago (Brentford) is an interesting case. His movement does not necessarily result in a frequent number of shots from his team, but when there is a shot-ending possession, 32% of the time it'll be from Thiago.
Haaland is the converter: fewest possessions of the eight, 13.4% shot-ending, and involved personally in eight of his team's 13 goal possessions.
Minteh is the space-creator: an identical 13.4% shot-ending rate, but with a higher participation in generating imbalance possessions.
Does more frequency equal more productivity?
Zooming out to the full population of 123 qualifying forwards, the behaviour frequency correlates positively with attacking output, and in the graphic below we showcase its relationship with expected goals.
Conclusion
Attacking players who are doing this more equates to more positive outcomes, but through volume rather than efficiency. The busiest exploiters convert no better than the rest. What separates elite output is how many broken-line situations a forward manufactures per 90, then whether his role casts him as the converter or the decoy.
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