A team that forces the goalkeeper long looks lazy in the pressing numbers

Passes allowed per defensive action rewards teams that let the ball be played, and punishes the ones that stop it being played at all.

Take the metric literally for a second. You count the opposition's passes in their own build-up area, you count your tackles, interceptions, fouls and challenges, and you divide. Fewer passes per action means a more aggressive press. That is the story and mostly it holds.

Now run a perfect press through it. Your forwards curve their runs, the centre backs cannot find the pivot, the full backs are covered, and the goalkeeper hits it long into a header contest at halfway. What did you generate? One opposition pass, if the goal kick counts, and zero defensive actions, because nobody tackled anybody. Do that fifteen times in a half and your pressing number gets steadily worse while your press is working perfectly.

This is not a technicality. It is the exact behaviour good pressing sides are trying to produce, and the metric reads it as absence of pressing. Meanwhile a team that presses badly, lets the opponent play four passes through the first line and then makes a desperate tackle in midfield, records an action and shortens its average.

The usual defence is that these effects wash out over a season. I do not think they do, because they are not noise, they are bias with a direction. Teams that force long balls sit systematically higher in the numbers than they deserve, in the wrong direction, all year.

Some analysts have moved on and use field tilt, or the opponent's pass completion in their own third, or the share of build-ups that end in a long ball inside eight seconds. That last one is the closest thing to an honest single number I know of, and it is barely quoted anywhere because it lacks an acronym.

There is a broader lesson here about metrics that count events. Defending is largely made of things not happening, and event data is a record of things that happened. Any statistic built by counting actions will systematically undervalue the defender whose presence removed the need for the action.

If your press is good enough, it does not look like anything. That is the compliment and it is also why it does not show up on the sheet the analyst brings to the meeting.