PPDA cannot see the pass your press was designed to force

A pressing metric built on counting opponent passes rewards teams that let the ball circulate and punishes those that end possessions immediately.

Here is the awkward case. Team A presses so effectively that the goalkeeper hits it long on the second phase every time. The ball is in the air, contested, gone. Team A has completed its pressing objective, and its pressing metric looks unimpressive, because the opponent barely made any passes in their own half and the arithmetic wants a denominator.

Passes allowed per defensive action tells you about the density of your challenges relative to opposition circulation. That is a real thing to know. It is not the same as knowing whether the press worked, and the two come apart most sharply against exactly the teams you care about, the ones who have prepared an escape.

The escape is usually the goalkeeper. Modern build-up uses him as a spare man, so a press that succeeds in cutting the short options forces a long ball, and long balls are cheap to complete in the sense that a header on halfway counts as nothing much in either direction. Your metric registers a quiet passage of play. Your coach registers a win, because a fifty-fifty on halfway is a far better outcome than a settled opposition possession.

I would rather measure the press by what happens to the ball, not by how many passes preceded the tackle. Where did the opponent's possession end, how high, and what was the state of your team when it did. Those are harder to compute and they are the questions being asked in the dugout.

None of this makes the metric useless. It makes it a description of style rather than a grade of effectiveness, and it should be read the way you read possession share, as a fact about how a team likes to spend its afternoon.

Compare it to what a coach actually reviews on the Monday. He is looking at where possession was regained and what the state of the pitch was at that moment, meaning how many of his players were ahead of the ball and how many opponents were behind it. That is a picture of an outcome. A ratio of passes to challenges is a picture of an intention, and intentions are cheap.

Any pressing number that goes up when your press fails is telling you about something else.