Many passes may not guarantee success in football (see goals) and are often… football chatter, but they are a very good indication of a team’s preparation and well-functioning, and therefore a decisive factor in attack formation.

According to the Swiss Football Observatory CIES, the master of high passing tactics is none other than Pep Guardiola, with Manchester City leading the team in assists per game.

A statistical analysis of 1,226 teams in 71 leagues around the world showed that in every Premier League game, the champions of England changed the most passes on average, reaching 754 in 90 minutes plus injury time.

This means that anyone who watches Guardiola’s team for even one minute will see how they changed at least eight passes, which also means a high percentage of possession, even if it does not provide … the quintessence of the sport.

Manchester City is number one in the world – PAOK is number one in Greece, but Olympiacos and PAO are successful.

Only two other teams have more than 700 passes per game and they are Japan’s Albirex Niigata (711) and Benfica (708). Rounding out the top five are Paris Saint-Germain (693) and Maccabi Tel Aviv (682).

But how successful are all these passes? Does quantity match quality? They pretty much keep up statistically, with Manchester City having a 90.8% hit rate for their players, based on this year’s league competition data, trailing only Lionel Messi and Neymar’s Paris Saint-Germain, who both have an accuracy of 91.3 %. They are followed by Real Madrid (90%), Al Jazeera from the United Arab Emirates (89.2%), Niigata (89%) and Barcelona (88.7%).

But there is another very interesting category of statistics that studies where transmissions go, ie. whether they go across the field backwards, parallel or forward. Everything is completely different there and is connected with the style of play by country, and not just by teams. Thus, in the top 16 teams in terms of passing percentage, albeit with significantly fewer balls, there are five clubs from the second division of Argentina, with Riestra leading the way with 64.6% of forward passes.

Of the Premier League, Bournemouth (39.4%) is the team with the fewest passes in England per game (352), while City have the lowest percentage with 24.7%, with the highest percentage of parallel balls (57.2%).

As for Greece, the numbers show that the most… talkative team on the pitch is PAOK (570 assists per game), ahead of Olympiakos (559), AEK (557), Panathinaikos (532) and Ari (494). ). In terms of success, Olympiacos leads with 87.7%, followed by Panathinaikos (87.4%), PAOK (87.1%), Aris (85.3%) and Atromitos (84, 6%). Panaitolikos makes more forward passes (41%) and Olympiacos less (29.1%) who also has 57.2% of parallel passes.