The study you’re about to read is a telescope trained on football’s living, breathing heartbeat. A team of researchers from the Roslin Institute at the University of Edinburgh and a constellation of collaborators from institutions across Europe and North America sifted through thousands of elite matches to ask a blunt question: how is modern football really changing, and who is changing it most—the men’s game, the women’s game, or both? The answer isn’t a single thunderbolt but a steady, nuanced reshaping of how teams move the ball, how they press, and how they think about space on the pitch. The data behind this portrait comes from more than 13,000 matches between 2020 and 2025 in five countries, spanning ten top-tier leagues, and it blends traditional statistics with a fresh lens: pitch-passing networks that treat the field as a map of connected regions instead of a simple backdrop for players.
At the center of the paper is a simple intuition with surprising depth: football is a complex system, and the way teams circulate the ball is as much about geography as it is about individual skill. The authors, led by Rebecca Carstens and Maddalena Torricelli, show that teams have intensified their collective play—passing volume and accuracy have risen, and passes are increasingly attempted under pressure. But crucially, the mechanism appears to be not just “more of the same” but a fundamental shift toward possession-based buildup, shorter passing distances, and a heightened tempo of recovery when the ball is lost. The study’s scale matters: it isn’t a single club’s stylistic experiment, but a cross-country, cross-gender snapshot of football in the 2020s, built on a dataset that includes both men’s and women’s leagues and a diverse mix of tactical cultures.
Overhaul in ball movement
The core finding is almost tactile: players are passing more, precision is creeping upward, and teams are playing with the ball under more pressure than in earlier eras. The researchers quantified a rise in average passing volume, pass accuracy, and the share of passes completed while under pressure across seasons and leagues. Some numbers stand out enough to feel almost cinematic: top teams consistently complete more passes per game than mid-tier or bottom teams, yet all groups show a rising trend in passes per possession over the five-year window. It’s as if the game is adopting a slower, more deliberate tempo—carefully knitting through zones on the pitch to avoid giving the ball away—while simultaneously sprinting the clock with aggressive pressing when possession is lost.
One of the paper’s most engaging ideas is the pitch-passing network. Imagine the field divided into a grid, with each region a node and passes between regions forming the links of a live map. This network captures how the ball travels not just between players, but across the space itself. The team’s playing style becomes a pattern in that map: which regions matter, which paths are most traveled, and how evenly the ball disperses across the pitch. The study finds that network structures increasingly reflect a broader, more interconnected form of ball circulation. In technical terms, normalized outreach—the total weight of passes scaled by distance in the network—drops over time, while the average shortest path lengths extend. The upshot: teams aren’t just pinging the ball back and forth in familiar channels; they’re threading passes through a wider swath of the pitch, even as they keep the ball moving with tighter, shorter passes. The authors’ language is humane but precise: football appears to be moving toward greater possession with smarter, more cyclic ball control, not simply more attacking urgency.
What’s really striking is how this narrative plays out differently across genders and leagues. The study highlights that women’s competitions often show larger year‑to‑year shifts than men’s, a sign of rapid modernization in leagues that have only recently reached full professionalization in several regions. The Serie A Women’s league, for instance, reveals a distinct trajectory of pitch advancement and a tightening of tactical variability over time, suggesting coaches and players are carving out new, stylistically coherent identities in a still‑maturing ecosystem. It’s not just a smaller stage; it’s a different tempo, where the pace of change can feel faster because the professional scaffolding is newer and more dynamic. This isn’t a claim about one gender out-performing the other; it’s a testament to how structural change—investment, visibility, training, and data—can accelerate tactical evolution in parallel but along different lines across leagues.
How networks map the evolution
Beyond raw statistics, the study leans into network science to answer a deeper question: what structural shifts underlie the observed changes in ball movement? The pitch-passing networks treat the field as a spectrum of regions, turning complex on-pitch choreography into quantifiable topology. Several network measures become the language for discussing strategy. The largest eigenvalue of a team’s passing network tracks, in rough terms, its cohesion and robustness: higher values imply a more interconnected, reliable system for moving the ball. The average shortest path length signals how efficiently a team can reach any region of the pitch via passes from the rest of the network. In practice, elite teams tend to have both a high eigenvalue and a short shortest path length, describing a compact, well-connected web of passing options across the field.
What the data reveal over the five seasons is a nuanced asymmetry. While average pass length tends to shrink—teams favor shorter passes to reduce the risk of turnovers—the networks’ global reach expands in the sense that the ball is frequently moving through a wider array of regions. The research shows that the network outreach—essentially how far the ball travels on average across the grid—decreases, especially in the women’s leagues, even as teams circulate the ball across more of the pitch. It’s a paradox of sorts: you’re passing more reliably, but you’re also spreading possession over more regions. The authors interpret this as a strategic shift toward sustained ball control, even when facing high defensive intensity, paired with a higher-intensity press when you lose the ball. In the words embedded in the data, football is becoming a more physical, more patient, more position-aware game at the same time.
Another revealing thread is how top-tier teams distinguish themselves. The largest eigenvalue is consistently higher for top teams than for those in the middle or bottom tiers, indicating stronger, more cohesive networks. At the same time, top teams show shorter average path lengths, meaning their passing connections enable faster, more flexible movement across the pitch. In other words, the best teams don’t just pass more; they structure their passes so that a given region can quickly feed any other region, a hallmark of sophisticated spatial awareness and collective organization. The study also notes that while these network metrics can separate elite teams from the rest, they don’t always chase a single temporal trend across seasons—top teams adapt, while the broader field remains in flux as tactics and training evolve in tandem.
The analysis is grounded in a remarkably rich dataset assembled from StatsBomb event data, representing a true, cross-border laboratory for football analytics. The authors’ framework sits at the intersection of traditional performance metrics and modern network science, offering a lens that honors the sport’s artistry while stripping away the mystique around “how the game is played now.” It’s a reminder that a game with centuries of lore can still yield fresh insights when you map it with the right tools and patience. The work’s collaborative backbone sits in institutions spanning the Roslin Institute, the Network Science Institute in London, IFISC in Palma, IUSS Pavia, the University of Amsterdam, UPF in Barcelona, Reykjavik University, and several others, with leadership anchored by Rebecca Carstens and Maddalena Torricelli.
Why it matters for players, teams, and fans
If you care about the future of football—whether you’re a coach planning training blocks, a scout evaluating talent, a fan trying to read what’s happening on the screen, or a policymaker thinking about how to grow the game—the study offers a compass. The move toward longer possession sequences, shorter passes, and increased pressure under duress implies new routes to stamina, ball control, and tactical endurance. Coaches might rethink drills to emphasize rapid decision-making in tight spaces, rehearsing how to maintain grip on the ball without surrendering it to slippage under pressure. Scouts could use similar network-based measures to identify teams with robust passing architectures, not just flashy dribblers. And for fans, the work decodes the sport’s subtle shifts, turning the mystery of “what’s happening now” into a narrative about space, cadence, and collective intelligence.
The methodological backbone—pitch networks, eigenvalues, and path lengths—breathes new life into football analysis by marrying intuitive storytelling with mathematical clarity. It’s not a system for predicting every game outcome; it’s a language for describing patterns of teamwork. In practice, this means that teams with better network properties—stronger cohesion, faster cross-field access, and more efficient circulation—may have a tactically sustainable edge even in the face of aggressive pressing and tactical counterplay. The paper’s authors are careful to frame their conclusions as observations about evolution, not rules carved in stone, but the implications for training culture—more data-informed coaching, more granular player development—are compelling. And the cross-gender scope of the study makes a strong case that football’s modernization is a shared journey, even as the pace and texture of change differ by league, culture, and infrastructure.
One of the study’s broader takeaways is about the role of data in sport’s democratization. The authors argue that such large-scale, joint analyses—especially those that treat the pitch as a connected landscape rather than a backdrop—can illuminate hidden patterns that escape traditional statistics. The work also shines a light on the rapid, positive transformation underway in women’s football, where professionalization and investment are translating into tangible tactical modernization. It’s a reminder that the beauty of the game isn’t stationary; it evolves with the ecosystem around it: coaching, facilities, media visibility, youth development, and data culture all feed into how teams learn to move the ball and press with purpose.
Looking ahead, the researchers propose a series of future directions that feel like a natural extension of the ideas in the paper: longer temporal windows to understand cycles in men’s football, league-specific normalization to account for playing time, and the augmentation of pitch networks with defensive actions, set-pieces, or deeper positional data. The horizon here isn’t a single new tactic but a richer, more flexible framework for analyzing sport as a living laboratory. If you’re a fan who wants better tools to understand why a team’s build-up feels so different this season, or a coach who wants to test ideas about space and timing, this study offers both a map and a set of signposts for what to measure next.
Institutional anchor: The research behind these insights comes from a collaboration led by the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh, with co-authors and contributors from Northeastern University London, IFISC in Palma, IUSS Pavia, the University of Amsterdam, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Reykjavik University, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, the University of Trento, and Northeastern University in Boston, among others. Notably, the first author is Rebecca Carstens and the corresponding author is Maddalena Torricelli, whose leadership helped fuse statistical rigor with networked thinking to illuminate modern football’s tactical evolution.
