Evaluating passing ability in youth football

The most important variables for measuring performance in team sports such as football are physical condition and technical and tactical performance. However, because of the complexity of the game of football, it is difficult to ascertain the relative importance of each of these variables. Typically, performance analysis in football focuses mainly on the actions of the players in the presence of the ball, in particular on the precision of the passes and their effectiveness. As a consequence of its important role in creating scoring opportunities, the ability to pass the ball has a considerable weight when evaluating players. In fact, reference is made to the "number of passes" or the "pass completion percentages" of each player to check if they played a good game. Passing ability is of great importance also in the development of young football players. Although several studies have identified the importance of perceptual skills before passing and passing on overall performance in football, the number of studies that examined the impact of perceptual training on passing ability is limited. There have been attempts to measure these parameters for talent identification purposes and skill acquisition and intervention research. While the test has strong discriminant validity and acceptable test– retest reliability, no information exists on its ability to predict passing performance during a game. The aim of this review is to examine the strengths and limitations of these tests. The retrieval of scientific literature took place using specialized web searches on: PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, CrossRef using the PRISMA method.