In soccer, there is the field of play and there are the players upon that field. How those players approach their movement — whether on offense or defense — determines how the pitch gets divided up and where space is created. And space, as Sun Ra pointed out, is the place. It is what makes the game fundamentally possible, and how teams manipulate space is what gives them an identity.
The majority of teams in MLS defend territory before they defend individual players. Of course, from week to week you might see a player like Ike Opara dedicated more or less to staying within arm’s length of a threat like Zlatan Ibrahimovic, but generally speaking attackers are passed off from defender to defender as they move across the pitch.