The Spanish national team has adopted much the same tactic, often to devastating effect, and it has changed football into a game that is less about bold and brilliant attacking manoeuvres designed to secure winning goals and more about patience, avoiding mistakes, and ensuring that you don’t lose.

But how different, really, is tiki-taka? Even when football was about young children booting a rain-sodden lump of leather on a windswept sea of mud, we were taught about the importance of passing. Are Barcelona just doing more of the same, but better? That’s what Rodriguez and colleagues have set out to discover.

They have analysed footage of the 2012-13 games in the first divisions of Spain, Italy, England, France and Germany to find distinctive “motifs” in the patterns of passing. There have been previous studies of pass networks in football, but these have tended to concentrate on things like the passes between specific pairs of players. Rodriguez and colleagues have looked more deeply into the nature of the networks, searching for what they call “flow motifs”: extended sequences of consecutive passes between specific players. This concept of characterising different network structures using motifs or patterns of interconnection is one that has been developed previously by scientists to study natural systems such as networks of genes, neurons and organisms in food webs.

Messi business

Having identified the prevalence of such motifs in a team’s pass networks, the researchers compared the numbers with how often these sequences appeared in randomly generated networks with the same general features (such as the same average number of links between nodes). This meant studying hundreds of thousands of individual passes.

Even at a glance, the statistics for Barcelona stood apart from those of the other Spanish teams. For example, they used an ABAC motif (let’s say, Xavi to Messi, back to Xavi, then to Neymar) significantly more often, and an ABCD motif significantly less often. In other words, there was much more structure in Barcelona’s game: as the researchers say, “tiki-taka does not consist of uncountable random passes but rather has a precise, finely constructed structure”.

Barcelona's uniqueness became even more clear when the researchers carried out a so-called “cluster analysis”, which groups teams according to how often they use each of the five possible four-pass motifs (ABAB, ABCA and so on). While all of the other Spanish teams fall into two clusters, Barcelona occupies is out on its own. And this special identity remains when teams from other European countries are included – one or two other sides, such as Turin, West Ham and Juventus, fall a little outside the single main cluster in which all the other teams are now gathered but Barcelona stands distant and aloof from the rest of the European crowd.