A low PPDA can just mean you are losing badly

The pressing metric everyone quotes rewards teams for chasing the ball, whether or not chasing it was ever a plan.

Passes per defensive action. Take the number of passes the opposition completed in a given area, divide by the number of tackles, interceptions, fouls and challenges you made there. Low number, intense press. High number, sitting off. That is the pitch, anyway.

Now imagine a side being beaten 3-0 away from home. They have had 28 per cent of the ball. Their midfielders have spent an hour lunging at people out of desperation and frustration. Their PPDA for the match will look magnificent, and it will describe a team that has been dismantled.

The metric has no idea whether the defensive actions were chosen or forced, and it has no idea whether they worked.

That is the core complaint and it is not a small one. A tackle attempt that misses counts. A foul thirty yards from your own goal that gives away a free-kick counts, and counts positively. Meanwhile a perfectly executed press where a forward's run closes the passing lane and the centre-back turns backwards and plays it to the goalkeeper registers as nothing at all. No defensive action occurred. The press worked completely.

What I would rather see, and what better analysts already use internally, is a possession-adjusted version alongside two other things. How high up the pitch the defensive actions happened, because pressing in your own third is not pressing, it is defending. And what happened in the six seconds afterwards, because winning the ball back in the opposition half and then immediately giving it away is a treadmill, not a strategy.

The height part matters more than people realise. Two teams can have identical PPDA figures where one is winning the ball forty yards from the opposition goal and the other is winning it forty yards from its own, and those are not variations of the same approach, they are opposites.

There is also a personnel point buried in here. Sides with a genuinely well-organised press often post unremarkable PPDA numbers precisely because the opposition stops trying to play through them. If the other team's centre-halves start going long on the second pass every time, your press has succeeded so thoroughly that it never has to do anything, and your number goes up.

So the single figure is close to useless in isolation and it gets quoted in isolation constantly, usually as a one-line justification for calling a manager's team aggressive. Watch fifteen minutes instead. You will learn more about whether they press, and you will certainly learn more about whether it is deliberate.