Soccer passing is harder, shorter and sharper across pro leagues, new research finds
Northeastern’s new research group, NetSi Sport, released research analyzing how professional soccer gameplay has evolved over the last five years.
The amount and accuracy of passing in the game of soccer — called football across much of the world — has climbed in recent years, according to new research.
The average passing volume, pass accuracy and the percentage of passes made rose in gameplay over the last five years, with the biggest changes occurring in women’s competitions, according to a research preprint from the Network Science Sports Institute, or NetSi Sport, a new research group out of Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. Gameplay has become faster and more intense, suggesting there is greater defensive pressure.
The research, which will be submitted to Scientific Reports, studied event-level records from 13,067 matches from 10 top-tier soccer leagues in England, Spain, Germany, Italy and the United States that occurred from 2020 to 2025. The researchers quantified the match dynamics by examining conventional performance statistics and pitch-passing networks to track ball movement across the field.
The research preprint is one of the first from NetSi Sport and shows other ways network science can track patterns in confined physical spaces, said Brennan Klein, an assistant teaching professor in the department of physics and core faculty at the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University.
“There’s a lot we still don’t really understand about networks that are embedded in space,” Klein told Northeastern Global News. “But we can think about the techniques that really lend themselves to studying pitch passing networks and asking what is similar or dissimilar about the flows of the ball through the pitch in soccer compared to the flow of people on subways. There is a methodological core to these types of analysis that we could reverse engineer back into these other physical systems.”
While pursuing his doctorate, Klein said Sternberg Family distinguished professor Alessandro Vespignani noticed some visuals on soccer data analysis on Klein’s screen that Klein had been doing in his spare time. This inspired the idea of using soccer as a focus for NetSi Sport’s first piece of research.
“It’s a great example of a sport that has analytical techniques,” Klein added. “Network science has had something really special to say (whether) it’s a new frame of how to look at like neurons in a brain and how they connect to form consciousness or to look at airport mobility networks and see their role in epidemic spread. Any number of big questions can be seen through a network science lens. The natural next question is, ‘what does it have to say about sports?’”
With soccer, researchers could track individual player performances using a number of different metrics (such as speed and number of shots made) as well as track pairs of players and passes between them. The sport also lends itself to tracking how each individual player’s actions impact the rest of the game, opening the door to what Klein said are complex system-style questions.
This also all happens in a controlled environment that sets natural limits to the action.
“It’s this undulating blob of activity that when you watch it, you can kind of see that there’s some deep, rich language or pattern,” he added. “With traditional quantitative tools, it’s not easy to capture that. As a sport, it’s an awesome test bed for a lot of these techniques.”
Researchers combed through the plays from over 13,000 individual matches from the top five men’s and women’s leagues from England, Spain, Italy and Germany over the last five years. This represents one of the first large-scale assessments of soccer trends and one of the first large-scale studies of women’s professional soccer.
The team tracked each player’s actions and movements, representing each event with a color-coded dot on the pitch (such as purple for carries, gold for passes and blue for shots and fouls). This same method was used to further analyze specific moves like passes.
Editor’s Picks
By looking at these, researchers could eventually parse out trends about individual teams and leagues as a whole.
“(English Premier League team) Liverpool, for example, has a completely different pitch passing network (than other teams),” said Klein. “In analyzing this type of data, you can characterize a team by its imprint on the pitch passing network.”
What researchers found overall was that the plays became “harder, sharper, shorter and forward” over the last five years, Klein said. This means there’s generally more passes made under pressure with defenders close by, meaning the ball is often passed more quickly and more often. The average shortest path length also increased, indicating a wider circulation of the ball.
“There are so many more passes per possession,” said Maddalena Torricelli, a postdoctoral researcher in sports analytics with the Network Science Institute. “It is a faster way of playing the ball.”
The team also found that this shift was more prominent in women’s teams than men’s, though some trends followed nationalities. (For example, both the men’s and women’s Spanish teams had a higher number of offsides than other countries.)
“Men’s football … it’s more stable,” added Torricelli. “While for women’s football, these trends are notably increasing or decreasing. It means that they are going through a faster professionalization and evolution. For some of these metrics, nationality prevails over gender.”
The techniques the group used to analyze these games could be used on other sports as well, Klein added.
