Off the Charts is a series highlighting players whose output in a specific area has been outstanding. For Matchday 2 of the 2025-26 Premier League season, we look at those who impressed with their passing.
Matchday 2 of the 2025-26 Premier League season was bookended by two high-scoring games, with Chelsea thrashing West Ham 5-1 on Friday night before Liverpool secured a late, late win in a five-goal thriller at Newcastle on Monday night.
It was a matchday to remember for two English teenagers, too, as Max Dowman and Rio Ngumoha made their Premier League debuts aged just 15 and 16 respectively.
Dowman’s confident substitute performance for Arsenal and Leeds belied his age, with the youngster winning his side a penalty in added time.
Ngumoha enjoyed his own piece of added-time drama, scoring the winner in a 3-2 victory for Liverpool at St James’ Park with his first Premier League shot just four minutes and 15 seconds after coming onto the pitch.
At Opta Analyst, we’ve already reviewed the MD 2 action on a team level with our Knee-Jerk Reactions, but we also wanted to shine a light on some players who impressed.
This week in Off the Charts, we’ve decided to utilise our passing data and charts (well, data viz) to spotlight some players who stood out for their ability to pick out teammates on MD 2.
Who Made the Most Passes?
As you’ll no doubt be aware, making a lot of passes in a match doesn’t make you a master of passing. The players who often rank high up for the most passes in games aren’t usually those who find themselves in dangerous positions on the pitch.
That was very much the case on MD 2 of the 2025-26 Premier League season, with five different players attempting 100+ passes in a game – four of whom were central defenders, while the other was a central midfielder.
William Saliba’s tally of 123 attempted and 118 successful passes for Arsenal against Leeds United on Saturday was a seasonal high for a player, with defensive partner Gabriel Magalhães making 103 himself (and completing 94). In fact, their combined total of 212 successful passes were only seven short of their opponents’ entire total (219).
Saliba Passes vs Leeds
Pau Torres (for Aston Villa), Lewis Dunk (for Brighton) and Granit Xhaka (for Sunderland) were the other players to attempt 100+ passes in a game on MD 2 – a tally that only Chelsea’s Trevoh Chalobah reached on MD 1.
It is also worth highlighting the performances of some more creative players, further up the pitch from MD 2…
What About Passes That Had More Impact?
It was Youri Tielemans who topped the MD 2 (and so far, 2025-26) rankings for the most passes attempted in the final third of the pitch, with 36 attempted in Villa’s 1-0 defeat at Brentford on Saturday.
Tielemans Passes vs Brentford
Just 25 of those (69.4%) successfully found a teammate in the final third of the pitch, however, as Xhaka set an early-season high tally for successful passes in the final third (27) in Sunderland’s loss at Burnley.
When trying to understand which players had the most impact in attack with their passes, it’s natural to simply look at their tally of chances created.
Doing that would highlight Evanilson for Bournemouth and Yankuba Minteh for Brighton across MD 2, with both players creating the most chances from open play (4). But then that metric relies on a teammate getting a shot away, while it’s quite possible the pass was received far away from goal, and that they put in all the hard work to really create the chance.
This is where expected assists (xA) can come in useful. Expected assists measures the likelihood that a given pass will become a goal assist, rewarding players who pass into dangerous areas, regardless of whether the receiver takes a shot or not.
Like expected goals (xG), it’s measured on a scale between zero and one, where zero represents a pass that will never result in an assist, and one represents a pass that the receiver would be expected to score from every single time.
Jack Grealish had the highest xA figure across MD 2 (0.7), while it was also higher than any other player on MD 1 of 2025-26, too.
He assisted both of Everton’s goals in the 2-0 win over Brighton on Sunday in their first competitive match at the new Hill Dickinson Stadium, but even Grealish would accept that his assist for James Garner’s goal was hardly a measure of creativity. Much like goals, though, they all count.
Measuring Range in Passing
Another Everton player is worth mentioning from this weekend for his passes, as Michael Keane consistently found teammates with long passes.
Of players to play a Premier League game and complete at least 10 passes this season, the average successful pass distance of Keane’s 23 passes that found a teammate on Sunday versus Brighton was the longest (26.5m), just ahead of Wolves’ Emmanuel Agbadou (25.6m average across 41 passes).
Michael Keane Passes vs Brighton
Looking specifically at goalkeepers, Everton’s Jordan Pickford averaged the highest goal-kick distance (68.1m) as he preferred to hit it longer than short, unlike on MD 1 against Leeds (39.8m average).
Pass & Move (It’s the Liverpool Groove)
Looping back to the subject of Ngumoha, his debut goal was the 28th and final goal of MD 2.
Impressively, considering it arrived so late (100th minute) and at a real pressure point in the match, all 11 Liverpool players played a part in the winning goal, with Ngumoha’s only involvement being the finishing touch with his first shot in the Premier League.
It is the only goal this season to be scored with the involvement of all 11 players on the pitch for that team, while it only happened twice in the whole of the 2024-25 Premier League campaign.
Rio Ngumoha Goal vs Newcastle
Ngumoha’s goal ended a sequence of 13 passes, which is the third-longest passing sequence before a goal in 2025-26 so far, as well as one perfect dummy by Dominik Szoboszlai to give the 16-year-old his chance.
The goal with the most passes in the build-up was also scored by Liverpool, in their opening day victory over Bournemouth. Hugo Ekitiké’s opener that evening ended a move of 18 passes, involving eight of their players and lasting 55 seconds.
Premier League Stats Opta
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