Who Did the Defensive Work in the 2022 World Cup Final? The Pressing Map

If you only measure who has the ball, you miss half of football. Yesterday's look at the 2022 final showed Argentina controlled possession comprehensively. So here's the mirror image, pulled from the same StatsBomb event feed: the defensive work. The team that had less of the ball — France — did more defensive actions and did them higher up the pitch. That's not a contradiction; it's the out-of-possession half of a counterpunching game plan, and the event data draws it cleanly.

What counts as defensive work

I counted every defensive action each team made — pressures, ball recoveries, duels, interceptions, and blocks — and tagged each by where on the pitch it happened: the team's own third, the middle third, or the attacking third (where pressing high means winning the ball close to the opponent's goal). The figures are open play across regulation and extra time; the penalty shootout is excluded. Every count comes straight from the real events.

Read the bars left to right. In their own third the teams are level — both had to defend their box at times. The gap opens as you move up the pitch: France made more defensive actions in the middle third (145 to 134) and clearly more in the attacking third (79 to 64). France's defending was shifted forward. That's the signature of a side that, without much of the ball, chose to win it back high rather than sit and absorb — the front-foot half of a team built to spring forward the moment it turned possession over.

The nuance: equal intensity, different totals

Here's where you have to be careful, because raw counts can mislead. France did more defending in part because it had to — the team without the ball is the team making tackles. So I also computed a possession-adjusted measure, the idea behind PPDA (passes allowed per defensive action): how many passes a team let its opponent string together in build-up for each defensive action it made high up the pitch. Lower means more intense pressing.

On that measure the two teams were almost identical — each allowed roughly the same number of opponent build-up passes per high defensive action. In other words, relative to how much they had to defend, Argentina and France pressed with similar intensity. France's bigger raw totals are mostly a consequence of Argentina having the ball more, not evidence that France pressed dramatically harder per opportunity. The honest reading: France defended more and higher, but not at a higher rate once you account for possession.

Why this fits how the game actually went

The defensive map matches the texture of the match. For long stretches — especially the first hour — Argentina kept the ball and France chased, defending in a mid-block and looking to break. The elevated French actions in the middle and attacking thirds are those moments of trying to win the ball back quickly to launch a counter. When France finally turned the game on its head with two goals in 97 seconds, it came through exactly that mechanism: regain possession and attack at speed. The pressing numbers are the statistical fingerprint of a team that spent the night without the ball and made its living the instant it got it.

A worked check: the attacking-third gap

Take the clearest single number: France made 79 defensive actions in the attacking third to Argentina's 64, a 23% edge in the zone where pressing is most aggressive. For a team with the minority of possession, racking up more high defensive actions than its ball-dominant opponent is the telltale sign of a deliberate front-foot scheme rather than a passive one. Contrast a team that defends deep: its actions cluster in its own third, not the opponent's. France's distribution leans forward, which is the data agreeing with the eye test that France pressed to spring, rather than parking the bus.

The limits of this exhibit

• Possession confounds raw counts. The single biggest caveat: the team without the ball mechanically makes more defensive actions. That's exactly why the possession-adjusted (PPDA-style) read matters, and on that measure the teams were level. Don't read "France made more tackles" as "France pressed harder per chance."
• Action types aren't all equal. A pressure, a duel, and an interception are bundled together here, but they're different events — a pressure is an attempt to disrupt, an interception is a completed win of the ball. A finer analysis would weight them.
• Thirds are a coarse map. Splitting the pitch into three zones is a blunt instrument; a full pressing analysis uses the exact x-y locations and pressing sequences, not just which third. The direction (France higher) is robust, but the picture is simplified.
• One match, and a wild one. This is a single, chaotic, extra-time final — vivid but not a general law about either team. It describes this night, not France's or Argentina's pressing identity across a tournament.

The takeaway

Put the two days together and you have the whole match in two numbers-pictures. Argentina controlled the ball; France chased it, doing more defensive work and pressing higher up the pitch — though, adjusted for possession, both pressed at similar intensity. Neither picture alone explains a 3–3 final settled on penalties, but together they show why it was so close: one team imposed itself in possession, the other built its whole game around the moments it won the ball back. Control and pressing are two halves of the same contest, and the 2022 final split them almost perfectly down the middle.

Reproduce it

Filter the event feed to each team, drop the shootout (period 5), and count defensive actions (Pressure, Ball Recovery, Duel, Interception, Block) by pitch third using each event's location on the 120-long pitch. The possession-adjusted figure divides each opponent's build-up passes by the pressing team's high defensive actions. The chart is regenerated by charts/chart_wc2022_final_pressing.py against the bundled data_layer/wc2022_final_3869685_events.json — no network, nothing hand-entered.

Sources & further reading

• Free textbook: Chapter 12: Defensive Metrics and Analysis — the theory behind this, at DataField.dev.
• Match events: bundled data_layer/wc2022_final_3869685_events.json — StatsBomb Open Data (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), 2022 World Cup final. Charted by charts/chart_wc2022_final_pressing.py.
• Companion: Possession isn't control: the passing data from the final — the in-possession half of this story.
• Background: PPDA explained — the possession-adjusted pressing metric used here.
• Background: Transition and counterattacks — why winning the ball high feeds the break.