Why is Everybody Passing Backwards?

Defenders are closing down less. Attackers are passing backwards more. Has everyone just given up?

It is with a heavy heart that I must inform you that defensive pressure, the defining trend of soccer’s last five years or so, has gone the way of dabbing and Donald Trump tweets. Pressing is passé. Closing down is kaput. At least that was the gist of this FBRef tweet last week:

Statsbomb records a pressure event any time a defender gets “within 4-5 yards” of a ballcarrier. They’re light on specifics about how exactly this happens (it’s “a blend of Computer Vision and human driven collection with automated validation checks,” which sounds like the world’s weirdest Starbucks roast), but in general Statsbomb’s got a good reputation for data quality, so let’s take them at their word. Defenders aren’t stepping to a man anymore.

So, uh, why not?

You might wonder if there’s just less stuff happening in soccer games. Maybe tired players are killing the clock with balls out of play and injury stoppages, or extra subs and VAR are slowing things down. But the Statsbomb data on FBRef shows that touches and pass attempts are actually up a teensy bit compared to the last couple seasons, so there’s plenty of opportunity to apply pressure. Defenses appear to have simply decided they’d prefer not to.

In normal times a year-on-year drop that steep might hint that Statsbomb changed something about how pressure data is defined or collected, but this season is hardly normal. Besides, there are other reasons to believe this is a thing that’s really happening. Understat uses data from a different provider to calculate passes per defensive action in the opponent’s half, which is often used as a proxy for defensive pressure. According to PPDA, defenses have been dropping off for years, with high pressure down 24% since 2015-16. It looks like European soccer as a whole has followed Jürgen Klopp’s arc from fanatical pressing in the middle of the decade toward a more recent emphasis on press resistance.

It’s a little tricky to say when and why the defensive dropoff occurred. The way pressures have fallen off a cliff this year looks like it must be a pandemic thing, but the big PPDA dip happened earlier—in fact, it’s basically leveled off since 2018-19. That’s backed up by FBRef’s Statsbomb numbers, where tackles per touch have barely budged in any third of the pitch over the last two and a half seasons. Together these figures suggest a drama in two acts: defenses gradually stopped trying to win the ball high during the years when Zidane kept winning Champions Leagues, then when the virus screwed up the schedule everyone quit closing down altogether.

But wait, it gets weirder.

Picture in your head what happens on the field when the defense doesn’t step to the guy on the ball. More time to pick his pass, right? Sure, defenders who hang back can clog passing lanes or help mark passing options, but as long as nobody’s trying to snatch the ball our passer can sit around and wait for a good option to open up. But once an opponent decides to violate social distancing guidelines, it might be time to turn around and recycle the ball rather than risk coughing it up. Or so I thought. If pressure is decreasing, shouldn’t backpasses be decreasing too?

The reason this letter’s hitting your inbox on Monday instead of Friday is that I spent a couple days trying to get a more detailed picture of the death of pressure by using backpasses to measure when and where players were getting closed down (I don’t have Statsbomb data beyond what’s in the FBRef tables, so I’m stuck making do with proxies for what the defense is doing off the ball). The idea was that a pass that traveled backward by a certain amount, say five vertical yards, would suggest a pressing event. As it turns out that’s not how it works. Even as pressure has plummeted this season across the top five leagues, backpasses have actually increased in almost every part of the field. Huh.

A friend ran a quick check on Statsbomb data and confirmed: players are actually slightly more likely to pass the ball backward (by any number of yards, at any angle) when they aren’t under pressure. I’m always happy to learn something when my intuition is wrong, but I had a hard time getting my head around that one. So I pulled up a few of this weekend’s games (Leipzig-Dortmund, Roma-Inter, Barcelona-Granada) and clicked around at random to grab a small but diverse sample of backpasses that fit my original 5-yards-backwards definition. It’s not that exciting to watch, but you can take a look if you’re curious.

By my untrained eye, I’d say 10 of these 17 passes are played under pressure and another five with a defender 6-8 yards away and closing in fast. Could the decline in pressures be caused by players recycling the ball a split second quicker than they used to? You could make up all kinds of stories why that could be happening: tired defenders might be a little slower to close down, or attackers may have learned from years of hyperaggressive pressing that it’s better to recycle play fast, before it gets risky, and let opponents wear themselves out chasing the ball.

In other words, maybe there’s no mystery to solve here about why defenses dropping off has failed to produce a decline in backpasses. Maybe causation runs the other way: because backpasses are increasing, defenders are having a harder time getting a sniff of the ball.

There’s always a risk of reading too much into differences between first-half and full-season numbers, especially in a weird year where one season kind of bled into the next. We’ll see whether any of this carries over to 2021-22 after players have had a real break and fans are back in the stadiums. Right now, though, passing is more conservative across the board—less progressive, more successful, and more often backwards—and it looks like that extra bit of caution might just be the thing that’s finally broken Europe’s pressing fever. ❧

Further reading:

• Tom Worville, Every Premier League team bar Villa are pressing less this season (The Athletic)

Image: Ilya Repin, Eugene Onegin and Vladimir Lensky's duel