Bayern’s PPDA dropped from 10.4 to 9.3 and high ball wins climbed past 18 a match. Ball losses rose too. A press count cannot tell you whether the press is working. To judge that, an analyst needs five fields around the turnover and the 20 seconds after.

The five numbers

For every possession a team loses inside the opponent’s half, log this:

1. Regain inside five seconds, yes or no. Bauer and Anzer’s 2021 Bundesliga model uses five seconds as the success threshold for a counter-press. A team’s season-long regain rate from these losses is the cleanest single read on whether the chase is winning the ball back.
2. The freeze frame at the moment of the loss. How many teammates within ten metres of the ball, and how many behind it. Bauer and Anzer use a 10-metre ball-radius test for local numerical superiority. StatsBomb’s pressure event is normally triggered around a five-yard radius of the ball-carrier, with some radius variation, while the rest-defense literature uses a different 10-metre construction around the deepest defensive line. With a numerical edge inside ten metres of the ball at the turnover, regain rate inside five seconds jumps from 30.2 per cent to 36.2 per cent. Four or more players from the team that has just lost possession behind the ball after one second is a useful model signal for counter-pressing classification, not a standalone label.
3. Shots for and shots against in the next 20 seconds, weighted by xG. Burnley counter-pressed 18 times a game, almost Manchester City volume, regained 14 per cent of the time, and conceded shots from 13 per cent of those possessions against a 10 per cent league average. A blocked 0.03 xG shot won is not the same reward as a central 0.30 xG chance, and a panicked 25-yard transition shot conceded is not the same cost as leaving a striker alone after one pass.
4. Direct speed of the opponent’s escape, if there is one. Opta’s direct speed metric measures progress toward goal per second. A press can fail without a shot conceded and still hand the opponent a fast break that resets the next phase on bad terms.
5. Quality of the possession before the loss. Length of phase, location of the loss, and whether the loss was forced by opponent pressure or self-inflicted by a rushed final action. This is the only number that points upstream, and it is the one Vincent Kompany was arguing about when he told Sky, “You can’t counter-press a hundred times.” Many counter-press failures start here.

A team is pressing well when regains are quick, the freeze frame shows a numerical edge near the ball with bodies behind it, the xG balance in the next 20 seconds is positive, and the possession phases that produced the losses were stable enough for the shape to be set. A team is exposing itself when any one of those columns goes red — and the league-wide trend says that risk has been rising.

Why the surface metrics fail the test

Bayern’s argument explains the trap. Tom Bischof, the 20-year-old midfielder, said the team was missing “the counter-press immediately after losing the ball” and were having to make long recovery runs instead. Kompany pushed the cause one step earlier: the problem was not the will to press but the quality of the possession before the loss.

Miasanrot split the season into 25 matches before the New Year and 28 after, using Wyscout data. High ball wins in the attacking third went from 15.8 to just over 18 per match. PPDA fell from 10.4 to 9.3. Both numbers said the press was sharper. But ball losses rose from around 98 to over 102, and passes per possession phase dropped from just over seven to just under. Their Wolfsburg example was a bad-loss scene, not a failed-press scene: Bayern forced the last action before the turnover — a dribble into traffic, a long ball into nothing — with their shape nowhere near ready to counter-press.

Opta’s own definitions admit the limit. PPDA — passes per defensive action — counts the opponent passes a team allows outside its own defensive third for every tackle, interception, foul or challenge it makes in that area; a lower number means the team is hunting the ball higher up the pitch. A high turnover is an open-play possession that starts within 40 metres of the opponent’s goal — a related but not identical concept to Wyscout’s high ball wins. Opta separates the high turnovers that end in shots or goals in its stats glossary, which is the first honest check — did pressure turn into danger or just into activity — but neither metric tells you what happened in the 20 seconds the team did not regain.

StatsBomb made the same point when it introduced pressure events. A defender within five yards of the player on the ball counted as a pressure; counter-pressing was pressure inside five seconds of a possession change. Across 177 Premier League matches in their counter-pressing study, fewer than half of open-play possessions in counter-pressing zones were pressured inside five seconds. Burnley’s volume looked Manchester City-shaped on the surface. Their regain rate ranked 17th in the sample, and their shot-conceded rate from those possessions ran above the league average. Press counts, in isolation, will praise a team for defending the chaos it created.

Where each of the five numbers comes from

Regain inside five seconds. Bauer and Anzer treated counter-pressing as a transition pattern rather than a box-score event in their 2021 paper in Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery. They used synchronized tracking and event data, hand-labeled more than 20,000 defensive transition situations from 97 matches, trained the XGBoost detector on the eligible labeled sample, and then applied it to more than six seasons of Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga data. Their best season-level indicator was the ratio of successful counter-presses to total transitions, which correlated with final ranking at r = -0.44. Shot balance and goal balance after counter-pressing followed, at r = -0.36 and r = -0.42. Around 62.5 per cent of labeled transitions were neither clear counter-press nor clear fallback, which is why “fast regain” without context is noisy. A team can recover quickly because it pressed well, because the opponent miscontrolled, because the possession was never stable, or because the score shifted the opponent’s risk.

The freeze frame. Numerical edge inside ten metres of the ball at the turnover lifted the regain rate from 30.2 per cent to 36.2 per cent in the same study. Four or more players behind the ball after one second contributed positively to the model’s counter-pressing classification. The rest-defense literature scales this up with its own ten-metre construction, measured in front of the deepest defender rather than around the ball. Leander Forcher and colleagues defined rest defense in 2023 in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine by interviewing seven professional coaches and testing the definition against tracking and event data from 153 Bundesliga matches. The average rest-defense picture across 2,951 situations was 3.70 defenders against 2.01 attackers, a 1.69-player edge, with attackers controlling 11.51 per cent of the space from there to the defending goal line. Successful rest defense aligned with numerical superiority, tight shape, and a deeper last line. The DFB Academy’s coaching guide makes the same point in coaching language: distances too short and the attack suffers, distances too long and the team has no access after the turnover.

Shots for and against in the 20 seconds after, weighted by xG. Anzer and Bauer’s 2021 Frontiers in Sports and Active Living xG model used 105,627 Bundesliga and 2. Bundesliga shots, with synchronized tracking and event data and inputs for defender and goalkeeper positions, pressure on the shooter, location, and shot type. The Premier League trend says the cost side of this column is rising. Adrian Clarke’s official Premier League review said increased pressing had left more holes to exploit: fast breaks rose from 451 in 2022-23 to 599 in 2023-24, shots from fast breaks from 382 to 526, shot-ending high turnovers from 938 to 1,079. Opta Analyst’s build-up risk piece reports that the average xG of shots following a high turnover in early 2024-25 was 0.11, the highest in Opta’s 10-season window. The same piece reports that, within 30 seconds, short goal-kicks in 2023-24 led to 63 shots and nine goals for the teams taking them, against 86 shots and 12 goals conceded.

Direct speed after escape. Opta’s sequence speed measures ball movement; direct speed measures progress toward goal per second; a fast break is an attempt created after quickly turning defence into attack after winning the ball in your own half. Benedict Low and colleagues showed why the press has to account for what it gives up: in 72 11v11 attack-versus-defense trials with 69 youth players, a high press cut inter-team distance and reduced attacking possession time but produced bigger defensive dispersion, longer team length, larger inter-line gaps, more space for attacking midfielders and forwards, and more penetrative passes from the attackers. UEFA’s EURO 2024 technical report adds the international response: the average distance of the second pass after a goal kick was 47.9 metres, with technical observer Michael O’Neill praising Slovakia against Belgium for skipping the full-back outlet and playing straighter into advanced midfielders and the centre-forward.

Quality of the possession before the loss. This is the input column most analysts skip and most coaches fight about. Length of phase, central versus wide loss, contact versus self-inflicted, and whether the team had time to set the rest defense. Bayern’s numbers — possession phases getting shorter while losses rose — say their counter-press was being asked to repair situations that better build-up would not have created.

Putting it together

A press can succeed without a regain if it forces a long ball, traps the opponent on the touchline, delays the counter, or turns the attack backward. A press can fail without conceding right away if the first escape pass breaks the shape and sets up the next dangerous action. Neither of those outcomes shows up in PPDA. Both show up in the five fields above.

This is also where both Kompany and Bischof can be right. Bischof can be right that Bayern’s counter-press looked less forceful and less precise. Kompany can be right that the bigger cause sat earlier — too many rushed possessions, and too many losses from shapes that made the counter-press unwinnable before it started. The five numbers tell you which.

When a team’s PPDA drops and high turnovers rise, the question is not whether the press got sharper. It is whether the next 20 seconds produced their chance, the opponent’s chance, or a centre-back chasing 50 metres of open grass.