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No offence to Pep Guardiola, Jurgen Klopp and Mikel Arteta, but if you got a notification for every Premier League pass, you would have muted these guys years ago.

Over time, though, the passes acquire a shape.

Let’s start with how Arsenal became boring — and scary-good.



Arsenal

The last time we saw the current Premier League leaders in league play, they were slowly squashing Brentford like one of those hydraulic-press videos.

For minutes on end, Arsenal would win the ball in the Brentford half, swing it out to the wing, combine, attack, counter-press, repeat.

That’s not all that much in the grand scheme of things, only about four times a game, but it’s way, way more than most teams — over five standard deviations from the Premier League average.

If you had to forge Arsenal’s signature from pure passing data, it would look like a cramped little scribble on their right wing.

Arteta’s team didn’t play like this a couple of years ago.

You may remember their glory days of 2019-20 for the flurry of long-range balls that took defences by storm — and they certainly did plenty of that, at least compared to Guardiola’s short-passing machine — but their signature pass pairs back then involved a lot of sideways play at the halfway line as they poked around for an opening to rain down fire.

Lately, they’ve become something else entirely.

In 2021-22, when Thiago shifted to his favoured left side and took over the team, Liverpool began passing through midfield much more than they had before.

By direct speed, a measure of vertical yards gained per second in open play, they’re the ninth-fastest team in the Premier League.

A lot of piecemeal changes have left this team just a little bit creakier at both ends of the pitch — enough, in this season of small margins, to keep things very interesting.

And yet one key data point hasn’t changed: even now, one point behind two very good teams with 10 games to go, City remain comfortable favourites for the title, just as they’ve been all along.

Maybe pass pair data doesn’t hold all the secrets to football.
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