What 26 Passes Taught Us About Winning

Seventy seconds. Twenty-six passes. Not a single Paraguayan player touched the ball.

Deep into stoppage time at Los Angeles Stadium, with the US already leading 3-1, Mauricio Pochettino's team began to build pressure one more time. The ball moved left to right, through the back line and into the attack, threading across the field in a sequence that left Paraguay a step behind. Alexander Freeman finally passed it to Gio Reyna outside the box, who curled it into the far corner for his first World Cup goal. Fox analyst Stu Holden called it "one of the best back-to-front team goals this country has ever put together."

After the game, most people talked about Gio Reyna’s finish. Not the 26 passes that made it possible.

Every young player growing up wants to be the one who scores. That's natural; goals are what go on the scoreboard, they're what show up in highlight reels, and they're what people remember when the final whistle blows. Passing doesn't carry the same glamour. You rarely see a 13-year-old dreaming about playing a perfect ball into space.

What's worth pointing out to players, though, is that soccer records passing in a way most other sports simply don't. Football tracks yards thrown. Basketball tracks assists. But soccer tracks key passes, through balls, attempts and completions, of course, assists. The game itself acknowledges that the player who builds the play is a meaningful contributor to the outcome. A coach watching film doesn't just want to know who scored. They want to know who created.

And research backs this up. A 2022 peer-reviewed study published in SportK found that teams that consistently pass at or above 80% are significantly more likely to win. Meaning, teams who keep the ball moving are more likely to put wins on the stat sheet.

There's also a tactical reason for this that players often don't hear until they're older. The ball, when it's passed, moves faster than any player on the field can run. Even at full sprint, an elite youth player covers 7 to 8 yards per second. A clean pass covers that same distance in a fraction of the time, and it doesn't get tired, doesn't fatigue throughout the game, and doesn't risk getting slowed by a defender mid-stride. When a team passes well, they're playing a faster game than any individual could play on their own. That's not a small edge. 

This is where the coaching piece comes in. Getting players to genuinely value passing takes intentional work. It means designing training sessions where players can see the connection between movement off the ball, pass timing, and where opportunities open up. It means building a vocabulary around it: what makes a pass "progressive," why switching the field matters, how to recognize when a teammate is open before you receive the ball yourself.

At Zone 14 Coaching, this kind of thinking is embedded into the development process. The goal has always been to build players who see the whole field, players who understand that what they do without the ball is as meaningful as what they do with it. A player who can make a teammate better is, in the long run, far more valuable than one who can only make themselves look good.

Twenty-six passes. Seventy seconds. One unforgettable goal. But the goal was always a team effort. Help your players understand that before they start keeping score.