Dissecting a Winning Team's Passing Game

Two players ran the network, well clear of everyone else

Ranking every player by how central they were to the passing network for the match:

Sergio Busquets and Facundo Farías topped the team by a clear margin, with Serhiy Kryvtsov, DeAndre Yedlin, and Kamal Miller close behind. That's not just "touched the ball a lot" — centrality measures how connected a player is to the rest of the team's passing structure, and these two sat above everyone else in the squad.

Inter Miami passing network graph, players as numbered nodes connected by pass volume — Full passing network for the match — node size and connecting-line thickness scale with pass volume between each pair. Key nodes: 5203 = Busquets, 32878 = Farías, 18618 = Kryvtsov, 23828 = Miller, 5503 = Messi.

The busiest single connection was the two centre-backs

Looking at exactly which pairs of players exchanged the ball most across the 90 minutes:

Kryvtsov and Miller combined for more passes between them than any other pair on the pitch, with Yedlin-Taylor on the right and Busquets-Miller close behind. Before Inter Miami built anything forward, the ball usually ran through this pairing first.

Grid of pitch diagrams showing the top passing combinations for the match — The ten most frequent passing combinations of the match, plotted as pass direction on the pitch.

The players circulating the ball weren't always the ones creating shots

Cross-referencing the network above against which passes actually led to a shot:

Busquets shows up in both lists — the connective core and a direct shot creator. But Jordi Alba, David Ruiz, and Robert Taylor also set up shots despite not being the highest-volume passers in the network above — including a pass that found Messi in the box. Controlling possession and creating danger weren't always the same job on this team.

Pitch diagram showing every pass that led to a shot, labeled with passer and recipient names — Every pass that led to a shot — red labels are the passer, blue labels are the recipient.

Where possession actually landed

Mapping every pass reception across the pitch for the full match:

Reception density clusters through the center and the right side, matching the Kryvtsov-Miller and Yedlin-Taylor combinations above — the heaviest traffic wasn't evenly spread, it ran through the same handful of lanes the pairing data already pointed to.

Heatmap of pass reception locations across the pitch — Pass reception density across the pitch for the full match.

Five names came up across every angle of this analysis — Busquets, Farías, Kryvtsov, Yedlin, and Miller — the players an opponent would need to disrupt to break Inter Miami's passing structure, not just the most visible names on the scoresheet.