Who owns the pitch? From passes to purpose - how xT and EPV reveal the real value of possession

Last time, I looked at expected goals and one of the problems with analysing football purely through shots. A team can dominate territory, repeatedly break lines and spend long periods forcing an opponent backwards, yet if the final pass is fractionally over-hit, the resulting xG is zero.

Nothing happened, at least according to the shot data.

Anyone watching the game knows that is not really true. Before there is a shot, there is space. Before a chance is created, somebody has to access that space, and before the ball arrives, players are constantly competing to determine who controls it.

This is where pitch control becomes interesting.

If the ball was played into this area now, which team would be most likely to get there first and control it?

Suddenly, rather than treating the pitch as a 105-metre-by-68-metre expanse of identical green grass, we start to see football as something dynamic. There is the physical pitch, and then there is the pitch the players actually have available to them. Those are not the same thing.

What do we actually mean by pitch control?

Imagine pausing a match. The players are frozen, but instead of simply looking at their positions, we ask which areas each player could realistically reach before an opponent could reach them.

A simple solution is to draw a boundary around every player based purely on who is closest to each point. That is the logic of a Voronoi diagram. It gives us a useful starting point, but footballers are not stationary dots.

A player sprinting forward at full speed has a very different influence over the space ahead of him than a player travelling in the opposite direction. Acceleration matters. Maximum velocity matters. Reaction time matters. Distance matters. The ball matters too.

The idea of player 'dominant regions' goes back to work in the 1990s, while later approaches increasingly incorporated movement, physics and probability. Modern pitch-control models, therefore, estimate influence over space rather than simply assigning territory to whoever happens to be closest (Martens, Dick and Brefeld, 2021; Higgins et al., 2023; Wu and Swartz, 2025).

That distinction is important. Pitch control is not really asking, 'Where are the players?' It is asking, 'Given where the players are, where they are moving and how quickly they can get there, what space is actually available?'