Beside the Reflecting Pool, framed by the Mother Church and the colonnade of the Christian Science Plaza, soccer has found an unexpected home. Here in Boston’s Back Bay, researchers at Northeastern University study the passages of play that rarely make the highlights: how players exchange passes, move into space and organize a possession. Their work speaks to a question familiar to Italian fans: how do talented players become a successful national team? ItalianResearcher Maddalena Torricelli and her colleague Brennan Klein examine the connections between players to understand how a team’s organization helps individual talent flourish, or holds it back. The group is NetSI Sport, based at Northeastern’s Network Science Institute, directed by Alessandro Vespignani. Klein and Torricelli lead the project together, working with master’s and doctoral students. Using match records and network analysis, they study how teams move the ball, create opportunities and develop a recognizable style. During the 2026 World Cup, they mapped passing patterns for Northeastern’s NGN Offside coverage. The work was descriptive rather than predictive: it showed how teams played, without claiming to forecast who would win. Their broader research explores tactical patterns, scouting and the differences between soccer traditions, including Italy’s.

You describe soccer as a language. What does that reveal beyond goals, assists and possession statistics?

 Klein: “When two people have a conversation, they exchange patterned sequences of sounds and words. Together, those sequences create meaning beyond the words themselves. I see soccer in the same way. A match is a sequence of discrete events: a pass, a carry, a ball reception, a dribble, a shot. Over a single possession, those events create meaning beyond the individual elements.

“A match has between 3,000 and 4,000 of these events, all organized in complex and, at times, predictable sequences. Once you start thinking about linguistic patterns, you can ask: Are there dialects? Do different countries have ways of playing that set them apart? Fans might think of Spain’s style at this year’s World Cup, or the distinctive styles of Italian leagues and national teams over the years. As we use networks and AI to study tactical patterns or scout creative players, we’re asking whether there are more effective ways to organize play and help teams carry out their plans.”

Before the World Cup, you identified twelve players to watch. How do you look beyond individual statistics when evaluating talent?

 Klein: “Individual statistics matter: how many carries or progressive passes a player makes in the final third, how often they press or sprint. But my core belief, as both a fan and a scientist, is that soccer works through networks.

 “It’s a little like a workplace. The best performers may be superstars, but without the right team or structure around them, they may not perform to the best of their abilities. A player can be immensely strong, powerful, smart or clever. What helps their success, or hinders it, is the organization around them: the movement of the ball and the pressing their teammates do.

“For our World Cup selections, we looked at individual statistics and performance over the season. Beneath that surface, we asked how well players were performing within the networks around them. What is it about everyone around us that makes us individually successful? And how can we quantify that?”

What did the passing networks reveal about the World Cup’s four semifinalists?

 Klein and Torricelli: “The analyses were mostly descriptive: no modeling, no prediction. Still, even a simple passing network shows immediately how a team is structured and how it uses the field.

“Spain built its game around the same two hubs in every match: Rodri as the deep-lying pivot and Pedri in an interior midfield role. It was a dense, repetitive network. Argentina also relied on a hub, Paredes, channeling play vertically toward the strikers. Without him, the network shifted toward Mac Allister and became more horizontal, with play spread more evenly among the forwards.

 “France and England had flatter, more distributed networks, with no single player anchoring the structure. Both semifinals paired a team organized around hubs with a more distributed one. Passing volume alone didn’t decide much: England reached the semifinals with the fewest passes of the four. Disrupting the opponent can matter as much as building your own play.”

You’re in discussions with teams and clubs, including some in Italy. What are you hoping to develop with them?

 Klein: “We’re in early conversations with teams and clubs, including some in Italy. Part of what we’re building is a set of educational opportunities for students and young people to learn about networks, artificial intelligence and data.

 “We use sports, and soccer in particular, as a Trojan horse: a way to introduce complex systems, networks, data science, AI and coding through something young people may already care about. That can help them understand the networks they’re part of in everyday life, from transportation systems to their own social connections.

“Scientists need to get better at helping a new generation develop both a quantitative and a qualitative understanding of the world around them. Sports is a great way to do that.”

 From your vantage point in Boston, where should Italian soccer start if it wants to get the national team back to the World Cup?

 Torricelli: “That’s the million-dollar question. What the data show is how players play a given match: their positioning, their passing, how they build up from the back. Those patterns carry signatures, and a national team carries several at once.

“Some belong to a coaching staff. Some come from clubs, when a national team draws a core of players from one or two teams, as Italy did when it won the 2006 World Cup. Others reflect a broader tradition, such as Italy’s defensive approach to protecting a lead, catenaccio. With enough matches, we can follow how these characteristics evolve and how top teams differ from the rest, as we did across competitions and countries in our study published in Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-52701-6).

 “What the data does not show is what happens off the field, behind closed doors or how the federation is run. A match is only the final stage of a much longer buildup. The daily work of players, coaches and management shapes the style and quality of the play, but we can only infer its impact.

 “Like any team, the national team needs consistency, built through preparation. On the field, you only need to score one more goal than your opponent. Everything that makes that possible happens before the match, plus a bit of luck.”