To the right is a chart that highlights how teams might choose to play.

All season long PScore has only been scoring the direct/indirect passing dimension, but in September, thanks to work by @MattyAnselmo and @KevinMinkus here at ASA, the PScore will now include the defensive dimension.

To determine a team’s offensive directness I looked for observations of extreme possession where the score of the game was within one goal, and built a regression using passing styles to predict each team’s level of possession. Essentially, how a team is passing the ball is indicative of how likely they are to have possession.

This month the PScore will include a very simple metric to describe how high a team presses, and that is passes allowed per defensive action attempted in a team’s attacking half. The defensive actions are simply attempted tackles and interceptions. Those statistics are the best at identifying defensive intent. Other statistics like clearances or blocks are reactionary in nature, so not included in the analysis. I looked at defensive pressure across the entire pitch and the attacking half has the most variability. Here is a chart of all the teams.