Pressure: the chart and the 15-minute average
Pressure appears in two ways on the panel: a bar chart, minute by minute, and a number, the average over the last 15 minutes. Both come from the same measure and answer different questions.
Where it comes from
Every 30 seconds a dominance index arrives for each team, describing which side is closer to the opposing goal at that moment. That is the raw material. Everything the panel does with it is described below, with no hidden step.
The chart: who was on top each minute
For each minute, the panel averages that minute's readings of the home side minus the away side. The bar goes up when the home side was closer to goal, down when it was the away side, and stays near zero when nobody dominated.
Above 6, the bar stops growing on purpose. The chart is there to read the shape of the match — who was on top, when control changed hands — not to record peaks. One giant bar in an isolated minute would hide everything else.
The dots mark the goals. Seeing where they fall relative to the bars is the most useful reading of the chart: a goal against the run of play, a goal at the end of a spell of pressure, a goal with no pressure at all before it.
The 15-minute average: who is on top now
The number in the Pressure (15′) column is the average of each team's index over the last 15 minutes of match clock. It is two numbers, one per team.
Two choices in the calculation change the reading. First: the clock is the match clock, not real time — half time does not count, so just after the restart the average still carries the end of the first half. Second: with fewer than four readings in the window the number does not appear, because an average of two readings would be noise dressed up as a measure.
How to read the two together
The chart tells the story; the average says where in it the match is. A home side that dominated the whole first half and sees the bars turn downward after the break looks like this: bars above zero in the first half and below it in the second, and a 15-minute average higher for the away side.
And the average alone misleads in a predictable way: it does not know whether the current pressure is new or has lasted the whole match. The chart answers that.
What pressure does not mean
- It is not possession. The two numbers do not add up to a hundred, and both sides can be high at the same time.
- It is not an imminent goal. A tall bar describes what has just happened on the pitch.
- It is not comparable between competitions with different coverage. When a competition does not send the index, there is no chart, and the average shows as a dash.
If the question is whether the match is more intense now than at the start, the right measure is not pressure: it is acceleration, which compares the recent pace with the pace of the whole match.
Updated on Nov. 2, 2026.