Equal Pass: Comparing Passing Networks of England’s Top Women’s and Men’s Football Leagues

With women’s football finally receiving more attention, more and more studies explore differences to men’s football, mostly focussing on physical and technical indicators. This study is the first to compare the players’ collaboration between genders using social network analysis based on 328 matches of the FA Women’s Super League and 760 matches of the English Premier League. To compare overall team collaboration, patterns of density and transitivity were analysed. Additionally, the study examined degree centrality, closeness, betweenness, and eigenvector centrality as metrics to assess individual behaviors within the network. All statistical analyses were performed using Wilcoxon signed-ranked tests. We found no significant gender differences for all of the investigated metrics. Higher-ranked teams, in both genders, achieved significantly higher values than lower-ranked teams across all metrics except for eigenvector centrality, with larger effect sizes for density (rfemale = 0.47, rmale = 0.54). Practical differences between home and away teams could only be seen in men’s football, but with very small effect sizes. Therefore, this study can contribute to the state of research in three ways. Firstly, all the investigated network metrics except eigenvector can be used as football performance indicators without gender differences. Further, for both genders and all metrics there are no differences of practical meaning regarding home and away teams. Finally, we could show that there are no differences between male and female teams for the investigated performance indicators.