A Pass Mistakenly Called a Cross
I’ve been thinking for a while about a particular action in the football game, and during last Sunday’s match between Real Valladolid and Deportivo Alavés, it caught my attention again. That action is the cross.
The cross is something we often train the wrong way, and the problem starts with the name itself. It seems that by calling it a “cross,” we treat it as something separate from the usual in football, but in the end, it’s just a pass. A lateral pass, which might be short, medium, or long. A pass that can be on the ground or in the air, but still a pass. Something common, something we repeat almost every second in training or a match.
I don’t mind calling the action a “cross.” But just because we call it that doesn’t mean we should train it differently from any other pass, without a clear teammate, without context… without a purpose. Every pass has a purpose. And that purpose must be clear when we train this technical action every day.
How often do we design crossing drills, lateral passing drills, and see our players whip in lofted balls that don’t reach a single teammate? How often, in matches, do players cross when there’s no one in the box—or maybe just one teammate surrounded by three or four defenders? How often do we see a cross that forces the attacker to stop their run in order to shoot, giving the defender the advantage?
And when we scout wide players, how often do we see a high number of crosses with very low expected assists (xA)?
I believe that if we start treating the “cross” for what it is, a pass, we’ll become far more effective.
The first thing we need to do as coaches is set a clear goal for the players: to pass the ball, in the way they feel most comfortable (age-appropriate), to a teammate. Let’s make that the objective when they’re in a crossing position.
The second step is to reduce the crossing distance. Let’s aim for crosses to happen inside the box, no further than 16.5 meters out.
A few years ago, we had a debate about this. To support my argument, I ran an analysis of crosses, or lateral passes, aimed at the center of the box, both from inside and outside the 16.5-meter zone. The data was based on our own team. We saw a 0.15% success rate for balls sent from beyond 16.5 meters, compared to a 30% success rate for crosses made from inside the area.
I encourage you to run this analysis with your teams. The numbers might vary, and if they do, adapt to them. That leads me to the third point: we must work within probabilities of success.
As in the previous section, there’s a higher percentage of success if the action is done from certain areas or with certain trajectories. The crossing zone isn’t only about width or depth, it can also be an interior position. That frontal pass, that cross delivered straight from a central area, can be affected by many things: the height of the defensive line, a late run from a second-line attacker, a moment of imbalance in the defending team…
And then there’s the height of the cross. We’ve somehow accepted the absolute truth in football that if it’s a cross, it must be in the air.
But an aerial cross isn’t always more effective. When a defender is running toward their own goal or already set, they have more difficulty defending a ball that arrives below hip height, between them and the goal. If the ball comes in high, it’s easier for both defender and keeper.
This is why we must analyze which trajectories are most successful, not just in football in general, but within our team specifically. That should be a starting point if we want to improve our effectiveness with crosses or lateral passes, and a foundation for building our playing model.
⚽ Want to rethink how you train “crossing” with purpose?
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