Beyond Success and Failure: Measuring Pass Quality in Football with Tracking Data Analysis and Use Cases

A novel approach to measure the quality of soccer passes on a continuous spectrum and estimate both the risk and reward across tracking data

Introduction

The introduction of the research paper highlights the importance of passing in soccer and the need for better measures to capture the risk and reward associated with different passing options. The authors reference Pep Guardiola’s emphasis on passing with intention and creating imbalances between attack and defense. They note that current passing measures, such as pass completion, fail to capture the varying levels of risk and reward involved in different passing situations.

The authors present a snapshot of play where a pass to one player (Costa) is riskier but more likely to lead to a shooting chance compared to a pass to another player (Fabregas). They argue that assigning both passes the same weight in current passing metrics is problematic for team and player analysis. They propose a better alternative that considers both the likelihood of executing a pass (risk) and the likelihood of creating a scoring opportunity (reward). They provide an example illustrating how such a metric could be useful in analyzing pass quality based on difficulty and the probability of a shot occurring.