Passes per Defensive Action

What it measures

Opponent passes allowed per defensive action in their build-up zone.

The question it answers

How aggressively does the team press?

In the Variation framework

PPDA counts how many passes the opponent is allowed to make per defensive action in their build-up area — a low number means aggressive pressing. It quantifies Phase 1 of the defensive model (the seven-second gegenpress window) and is later re-applied, from the attacking side, in the Lab's Reverse PPDA.

2026 World Cup example

Approximate
The 104 PMSRs don't isolate build-up-zone passes allowed, so the report uses an adjacent proxy: pressures spent per forced turnover. Split into quartiles across all 208 team-matches it produced the steepest win-rate gradient in the dataset — 60.4% → 45.1% → 38.5% → 9.6% — with the most efficient quartile pressing least (192 times a match) and the least efficient pressing most (332). Read this as pressing efficiency, not textbook PPDA. Read the full report →