Harder, shorter, sharper, forward: A comparison of women's and men's elite football gameplay (2020-2025)
Rebecca Carstens, Raj Deshpande, Pau Esteve, Nicol\`o Fidelibus, Sara Linde Neven, Ramona Ottow, Lokamruth K. R., Paula Rodr\'iguez-S\'anchez, Luca Santagata, Javier M. Buld\'u, Brennan Klein, Maddalena Torricelli

TL;DR
This study analyzes elite men's and women's football from 2020 to 2025, revealing increasing passing volume and accuracy, with a trend toward shorter, more concentrated passing networks, especially in women's leagues, indicating tactical evolution and professionalization.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive, cross-national comparison of match dynamics over time using event-level data and network analysis, highlighting evolving tactical styles in elite football.
Findings
Passing volume and accuracy increased over time.
Teams focus on shorter, concentrated passing networks.
Women's leagues show faster rates of tactical change.
Abstract
Elite football is believed to have evolved in recent years, yet systematic evidence for the pace and form of that change remains sparse. Drawing on event-level records for 13,018 matches across ten top-tier men's and women's leagues in England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United States (2020-2025), we quantify match dynamics through two complementary lenses: conventional performance statistics and pitch-passing networks that track ball movement across spatial regions of the field. Between 2020 and 2025, average passing volume, pass accuracy, and the proportion of passes made under pressure all increased, with the largest year-on-year changes occurring in women's competitions. Network measures reveal that normalized outreach decreased, indicating teams increasingly concentrate ball circulation into shorter-range passing connections rather than wide spatial distribution. These trends…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsSports Performance and Training · Sports Analytics and Performance · Sport Psychology and Performance
