Pass Direction Radar Under Pressure

A pass direction radar (polar histogram) plots the angular distribution of a player's passes — broken into directional bins (forward, forward-right, right, backward-right, backward, etc.) as a proportion of total passes. Overlaying two radars (pressured vs. unpressured) on the same plot reveals how much a player's decision-making changes under pressure. The delta between the two distributions is the analytical object of interest: does the player's forward-pass spike grow (pressure-positive), shrink (pressure-negative), or stay flat (pressure-neutral)?

Correct execution: normalize each radar to 100% within its condition (pressured vs. not) so that the shapes reflect directional proportions, not volumes. The comparison is about decision-making mix, not raw counts. Key interpretation: a large forward spike appearing only in the pressured condition means the player exploits pressure to advance the ball — Fabregas and De Bruyne show this. A player whose radar collapses to sideways and backward under pressure (Sissoko) is revealing a different response profile.

1. Not normalizing each condition independently: Unpressured passes vastly outnumber pressured passes — raw counts make the pressured radar invisible.
2. Ignoring multi-action response: Dembele looks pressure-negative on the radar but is pressure-positive via dribbling — must combine pass radar with dribble response to get the full picture.
3. Treating all directional categories equally: "Slightly forward" and "directly forward" are meaningfully different; bin resolution matters.