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A study of past Women’s EURO tournaments – which appears in the latest edition of UEFA’s coaching publication The Technician – highlights improvements in passing, pressing and possession as better coaching and fitness help the elite women’s game develop.
Quality, not quantity. This short slogan could feature in a broad summary of the key trends identified in a longitudinal study of the development of elite women’s football across the last seven UEFA Women’s EUROs.
The study, commissioned by UEFA using data from StatsBomb, assesses every Women’s EURO from 1997 up to and including this summer’s final tournament in England and it has found several significant markers of improvement.
For a start, teams have become more selective in their shooting and pressing – shooting from better locations and pressing higher in the final third – both of which are signs of improved levels of organisation and fitness.
When it comes to pressing, for instance, the average number of pressures has risen to 152 per game – compared with 112 in the first Women’s EURO of this century in 2001.
The impact of better coaching is evident too in the reduced number of turnovers of possession, which means that when teams get the ball, they are passing it better and making more profitable use of their spells of possession.
UEFA hopes that by identifying the important trends in the women’s international game, it can help the coaching community to build on the success of the 2022 finals.
