A New Way to Measure Pressing, and What It Shows in MLS and NWSL
With pressing data no longer public on FBref, American Soccer Analysis builds a composite metric from defensive actions, pass disruption and forced long balls to track which teams press hardest — and whether it actually wins matches.
Pressing is one of the hardest things in football to measure once the raw data disappears. American Soccer Analysis writer Nate Gilman notes that pressing data is no longer publicly available on FBref, leaving analysts to lean on blunter proxies: counts of defensive actions in the final third, PPDA (passes per defensive action, a measure of how many passes a team allows before making a defensive action), and the average height up the pitch where those actions occur.
None of those numbers fully captures what a press is trying to do. So Gilman constructed a composite rating built from three components, designed to flag the moments when a team's pressure is most likely to have disrupted an opponent's build-up play.
Three ways to catch a team mid-press
The first component counts on-ball defensive actions — tackles, whether won or lost, and opponent take-ons in the attacking 40% of the pitch, on the logic that a player has to be applying pressure to get dribbled past in the first place. Ball recoveries not captured elsewhere are folded in too.
The second, pass disruption, looks at possessions where pressure appears to have forced a mistake. It tracks incompletions of passes that should be easy — those with an expected-pass completion rate above 90% — along with interceptions of riskier passes and the recoveries that follow misplaced balls. Gilman concedes misplaced passes happen for all sorts of reasons unconnected to pressure, but argues that across a large enough sample, pressure is the simplest explanation for a pattern of forced errors.
The third component isolates the classic outcome of a successful press: a team strung together short passes in its own defensive zone before being forced into a long ball upfield to escape the pressure, rather than being dispossessed outright.
What the numbers say about MLS and NWSL
Combined with the PPDA benchmark from Cata Bush's Vizhub, the composite produces rankings that, according to American Soccer Analysis, pass the eye test. In MLS, Vancouver, Philadelphia and the New York Red Bulls lead across all three components, while Charlotte FC sits near the bottom in each. In NWSL, Kansas City Current, Gotham, the Wave and the Utah Royals occupy the top four, and Chicago ranks last in nearly every category — a result Gilman says matches how the Stars looked to anyone watching them in 2026.
The method's real value shows up in the detail rather than the headline rankings. Columbus wins the ball directly from opponents at a high rate through tackles and recoveries but doesn't force many misplaced passes. Dallas and Seattle show the opposite profile: strong at forcing turnovers through pass disruption, but less effective at winning challenges outright. Gilman frames this as the difference between man-oriented pressing, built around winning individual duels, and zone-oriented pressing, built around closing passing lanes and intercepting.
Boston Legacy stand out as a harder case to classify. They don't rank highly for winning the ball back directly or for forcing turnovers, yet they force opponents into long balls at a high rate compared with the rest of the league — a profile distinct from both the man-oriented and zone-oriented teams above them.
Pressing and winning don't always move together
Whether pressing more actually translates into winning depends heavily on league and season, according to American Soccer Analysis's correlation work against expected goal difference (xGD), a measure of the gap between a team's expected goals for and against. In MLS, the relationship has held across the last two seasons: teams that press more tend to post better xGD figures, with a moderate correlation in 2025 that has strengthened in the current campaign.
NWSL tells a messier story. This season, active pressing correlates strongly with a strong xGD. Last year, that relationship wasn't there at all. Gilman's reading is that in NWSL, the league's best teams currently happen to press a lot, rather than pressing itself being what makes them good — a distinction underlined by Chicago sitting poorly on both pressing and xGD at once, which makes the overall pattern look tidier than the underlying causal story actually is.
The limits of counting pressure from the outside
Gilman is upfront about what the composite can't do. Players misplace passes for reasons that have nothing to do with pressure, and some teams play long without ever being pressed into it. Not every defensive action registered high up the pitch stems from a genuine press or counterpress. And the method has no way of capturing a press that fails outright — when a team sets up to pressure the opponent but gets played through without ever registering a defensive action at all.
Those gaps mean the rating works best as a descriptive tool rather than a definitive one: a way of separating teams by pressing style and intensity using publicly available numbers, not a verdict on whether pressing wins matches on its own. American Soccer Analysis frames it as a first step in an ongoing effort to make sense of pressure without the pressing data itself.