High pressing is not free, and the bill comes late

Pressing high up the pitch is the most admired thing a team can do, because when it works it looks like aggression rewarded. Win the ball near the opponent’s goal, score, get praised for bravery. The problem is that the cost is paid somewhere the camera rarely points.

The hidden ledger

Every coordinated sprint to press is energy spent. A team that presses hard in August is borrowing from its own legs in April. The goals it concedes late in the season — the ones blamed on “concentration” or “luck” — are often just the invoice arriving for a style chosen eight months earlier.

How to spot it before the table does

Look at the second half of second halves. A team running out of its pressing budget doesn’t collapse all at once. It gives up five extra yards, then ten, then suddenly the opposition midfielder has time he didn’t have in the first hour.

You can see it a month before the results turn. That gap — between what the eye notices and what the league table eventually records — is where all the interesting analysis lives.