Harder, shorter, sharper, forward: A comparison of women's and men's elite football gameplay (2020-2025)

Elite football is believed to have evolved in recent years, but systematic evidence for the pace and form of that change is sparse. Drawing on event-level records for 13,067 matches in ten top-tier men's and women's leagues in England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and the United States (2020-2025), we quantify match dynamics with two views: conventional performance statistics and pitch-passing networks that track ball movement among a grid of pitch (field) regions. Between 2020 and 2025, average passing volume, pass accuracy, and the percent of passes made under pressure all rose. In general, the largest year-on-year changes occurred in women's competitions. Network measures offer alternative but complementary perspectives on the changing gameplay in recent years, normalized outreach in the pitch passing networks decreased, while the average shortest path lengths increased, indicating a wider ball circulation. Together, these indicators point to a sustained intensification of collective play across contemporary professional football.