Does High Pressing Actually Win Trophies? Ten Years of PPDA Data Have an Answer

The cleanest way to lose an argument about football is to bring up PPDA pressing stats at the wrong moment. Passes Per Defensive Action — the number of passes a team lets the opposition make before it bites — became the religion of modern coaching, and the catechism is simple: press higher, press harder, suffocate the build-up, win everything. The metric was introduced by Colin Trainor on StatsBomb in 2014, and within a few years it had migrated from a blog post into the private analysis rooms of elite clubs. A lower number meant a braver team. A braver team, we were told, lifted trophies.

Ten years of that data is now in. And it says something the orthodoxy does not want to hear: the teams that pressed the hardest mostly won nothing. The teams that won everything pressed less than they used to.

This is a story about how a tactic became a faith, and what the numbers did to the faith once there were enough of them to count.

Where did high pressing actually begin?

It began in Italy, of all places — the home of sitting deep. Arrigo Sacchi’s AC Milan, between 1987 and 1991, tore up the catenaccio rulebook and pressed.

Sacchi never played professionally and was mocked for it (“you don’t need to have been a horse to be a jockey,” he replied). What he built at Milan was the prototype every modern presser still copies. His 4-4-2 was not a shape so much as a leash: the entire team had to stay inside a 25-metre vertical block, no more, with a high defensive line and a synchronised offside trap, so that the moment possession was lost the nearest three players could swarm the ball (Coaches’ Voice). Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten, two of the most expensive forwards on earth, were drilled to harass opposing centre-backs. The most luxurious attackers of their generation spent their afternoons defending from the front.

It won. Milan beat Steaua București 4–0 in the 1989 European Cup final, Gullit and Van Basten scoring two apiece, and retained the trophy a year later. Here is the thing worth holding onto: Sacchi’s press worked partly because the laws of the game allowed it. The back-pass rule did not yet exist, and the offside line could be sprung as a weapon. When football changed the rules in 1992, the purest version of his system became harder to run — and the pressing idea went quiet for the better part of two decades, surviving in fragments at Ajax and in Marcelo Bielsa’s Argentina before anyone built a whole era on it again.

That detail — that the most extreme version arrives, wins, and then gets regulated or physically outrun into moderation — is the historical echo. It happens again. It is happening now.

What does PPDA actually measure, and why did everyone believe it?

PPDA measures pressing intensity: total opposition passes divided by your defensive actions (tackles, interceptions, fouls, challenges) in the attacking two-thirds. A figure of 8 means you allow eight passes before you engage; a figure of 15 means you sit and watch.

The reason it caught fire is that it gave a number to a feeling. Anyone could see that Jürgen Klopp’s teams looked frantic and aggressive; PPDA let you prove it and rank it. Klopp’s Borussia Dortmund won back-to-back Bundesliga titles in 2011 and 2012 on what he christened gegenpressing — counter-pressing the instant the ball was lost — and gave the philosophy its scripture: “Gegenpressing lets you win back the ball nearer to the goal. No playmaker in the world can be as good as a good gegenpressing situation.” The best playmaker, he said, was the press itself.

When Klopp brought it to Liverpool, the 4-3-3 was built backwards from the press. Roberto Firmino played as a false nine whose first job was not scoring but triggering — angling his runs to herd centre-backs into the channels where Sadio Mané and Mohamed Salah waited. The forward line was the first line of defence. It produced the 4–0 demolition of Barcelona at Anfield in the 2019 Champions League semi-final second leg, a 3–0 deficit overturned by a team that pressed Lionel Messi’s side into mistakes they never normally made, and it delivered the 2019 European Cup and the 2020 Premier League title. The orthodoxy looked unbeatable. Press, and you win.

So why don’t the hardest-pressing teams win trophies?

Because the hardest-pressing team of the modern era is Bielsa’s Leeds United, and they finished ninth and then got relegated. The lowest PPDA in the league is not a championship; it is a warning light.

Marcelo Bielsa is the purest believer pressing has ever produced — Pep Guardiola has called him the best coach in the world, full stop. His Leeds did not zone-press like Sacchi or trap like Klopp; they man-marked across the entire pitch, a 3-3-1-3 that morphed into individual duels everywhere, each player chained to an opponent from the halfway line to the corner flag. In 2020/21, their first season back in the Premier League, Leeds posted a PPDA of 5.9 — the lowest in the division across the previous four seasons, a number that meant they engaged after barely six opposition passes (Opta Analyst).

And the same data set that recorded that bravery recorded its cost. Leeds had a top-four attack and a bottom-two defence by expected goals (xG). Patrick Bamford ran himself into the ground up front; Kalvin Phillips covered acres as the lone screen; and the back line, stranded high and marked man-to-man, leaked chance after chance to anyone who could beat the first press with one pass. They finished ninth in a season everyone enjoyed, then collapsed the following year as the legs went and the injuries mounted, and were relegated in 2023. The most aggressive PPDA number in a decade of English football bought a good time and no medals.

That is the data contradicting the conventional wisdom, stated plainly: across the PPDA era, the teams with the very lowest pressing numbers — Bielsa’s Leeds the archetype — have a near-empty trophy cabinet, while the actual winners cluster in a more moderate band. Extreme pressing is not a strategy for winning. It is a strategy for being exhilarating and finishing ninth.

But didn’t Klopp prove that extreme pressing wins? Here’s the counterargument — and why it fails.

The obvious rebuttal: Liverpool pressed like maniacs and won the lot, so pressing clearly does win trophies. It’s a fair shot. It misses because Liverpool’s own numbers tell a different story than the highlight reels.

Liverpool’s pressing was at its most rabid in Klopp’s early seasons and then steadily eased off as the team got good. Analysis of their PPDA across his Anfield reign shows the press becoming less frenetic and more controlled precisely as the trophies arrived — they pressed with more judgement and less abandon, conserving the all-out swarm for the moments it mattered rather than chasing for ninety minutes (The Tomkins Times). The 2019/20 champions did not have the lowest PPDA in the league; Bielsa’s Leeds, the team that won nothing, did. Klopp’s genius was not pressing the hardest. It was knowing when to stop pressing — adding Thiago Alcântara, learning to hold the ball, trading some of the chaos for control. The counterargument assumes the trophies came from the intensity. The data says they came from the moderation of it.

What does the City treble prove about all this?

That you can win the biggest prize of all while pressing less than you ever have. Manchester City’s PPDA went up — they pressed softer — across the exact years Pep Guardiola built the best team of the era.

The numbers are stark. City’s PPDA was 7.15 in 2016/17 and 2017/18, the most intense in the Premier League both seasons; it had drifted to 8.55 by 2018/19, still league-leading but looser, and by the mid-2020s sat above 12, mid-table for pressing intensity. Pep’s pressing trajectory has been one long, deliberate exhale. And the treble came at the back end of it. In 2022/23, City’s structure was a 3-2-4-1 in possession that folded into a 4-4-2 out of it, with Rodri as a single anchoring pivot — the calmest, most positionally disciplined midfielder in the world — controlling the rest-defence so that City rarely had to sprint backwards because they rarely lost the ball in dangerous areas. They didn’t suffocate you with a press. They strangled you with the ball.

The 2023 Champions League final was the proof under pressure. City beat Internazionale 1–0, and it was Inter — Simone Inzaghi’s side — who pressed and harried and chased the game, while City absorbed, held, and won through Rodri’s controlled finish. The team that pressed more lost. As Sky Sports noted of Guardiola’s later evolution, he has been willing to trade some of that control for chaos as the league changed around him (Sky Sports) — but the chaos he embraced was Jérémy Doku’s dribbling and a faster transition game, not a return to the manic 7.15-PPDA press of 2017. The trophies tracked the retreat from extremity, not the pursuit of it.

So here is the answer the ten-year data set gives to the question in the headline: high pressing does not win trophies. Optimised pressing does. The single most reliable predictor of a barren season is having the lowest PPDA in your league.

Where is pressing heading, and what has it still not solved?

It is heading toward intelligence over intensity — pressing in selected moments rather than as a constant — and the problem it has never solved is the human body across ten months.

Every pressing era has died the same death. Sacchi’s Milan was outrun by its own physical demands and reined in by a rule change. Bielsa’s Leeds was the purest revival and burned out fastest, the squad physically wrecked by the very thing that made it beautiful. The unsolved problem underneath the whole PPDA story is sustainability: a press is the most energy-expensive way to defend ever invented, and no sports-science department has found a way to run it flat-out across fifty games without the injuries, the fade in March, the collapse the following season. The data can tell you who pressed hardest. It still cannot tell you how to do it in November and again in May without breaking the men who do it.

The smartest teams have already conceded the point. They no longer ask “how do we press more?” They ask “when is it worth the cost?” — pressing the throw-in, the back-pass under a bad first touch, the centre-back with a weak left foot, and sitting off the rest. That is where Sacchi was always heading, where Klopp ended up, where Pep arrived with a treble. The press did not win football. Knowing when not to press did.

The next coach to be hailed as a revolutionary will almost certainly press like a lunatic, post a PPDA nobody has seen in years, and play the most thrilling football of the season. Watch the data, not the drama. We have ten years of it now, and it keeps telling the same story: the team with the lowest number is the one to bet against in May.