Finding players with the Innovative Pass Index

Introducing Innovative pass index: a metric to find players who excel at finding attacking, progressive solutions.

If you are reading this, you are probably very interested in what you can do with data in football. One of my flaws is that I constantly am looking for new models. I want to innovate and create, basically finding the next expected goals to be important in the analysis space. Okay, that’s perhaps more into my brain than needed, but it’s an important lesson for me: I don’t always have to create everything from raw data.

You can create meaningful insights, scores and indexes from already existing metrics. In this article, I will look at existing metrics and try to find players with the most creative passing. I will do that by combining several metrics into a score which lead to more insights to look for players that do well in creative passing.

Data

In this specific little research we will work with player aggregated data from Wyscout. It contains the 2024-2025 season in Belgium’s first tier. I will filter for players that have played at least 900 minutes (which is the equivalent of the 10 full games). Then I will also filter for attacking midfielders (Position = “AMF”), because I want to find the most creative passers in the attacking midfield.

The data was downloaded on August 13th, 2025 and all handling, cleaning and calculations is done in Python. This can also be done in excel itself, or in other programming languages such as R or Julia.

Methodology

The Innovative Passing Index (IPI) was designed to measure a player’s ability to circulate the ball, penetrate defensive structures, and create attacking opportunities. Passing metrics were divided into three functional groups. Ball Circulation captures possession retention and accuracy, including Passes per 90, Accurate passes %, Forward passes per 90, and Accurate forward passes %, each weighted equally at 0.25. Penetration reflects line-breaking ability through metrics such as Passes to final third per 90 (0.20), Through passes per 90 (0.30), Accurate through passes % (0.20), and Progressive passes per 90 (0.30). Creativity focuses on vision and chance creation, represented by Key passes per 90 and Accurate progressive passes %, both weighted at 0.50.