From final-third entry to shot creation: a two-stage analysis of passer pressure and short-horizon attacking consequence in the 2025 UEFA Women’s European Championship

Progression into the final third is a key attacking transition, but the pass that crosses the boundary and the actions that follow it are not the same performance problem. We examined two sequential but analytically distinct outcomes: whether a final-third entry pass was completed and, conditional on completion, whether the same possession produced a shot within 15 s. We analysed public StatsBomb event and 360 freeze-frame data from all 31 matches of the 2025 UEFA Women’s European Championship. The primary cohort required at least 90% visibility of the 5-m area around the passer. Stage 2 was conditional on completion. Bayesian mixed-effects logistic regression used crossed match and team random intercepts. Event-only and passer-pressure-enhanced XGBoost models were compared using nested match-grouped cross-validation, training-fold calibration, paired match-level bootstrap intervals and outer-test-fold SHAP. The primary cohort comprised 2114 entry passes, of which 1261 were completed (59.6%); 235 completed entries were followed by a shot within 15 s (18.6%). Greater distance to the nearest defender was associated with higher completion odds (OR 1.35 per 2.9 m, 95% credible interval 1.21–1.50). High passes, passes launched farther from the final-third boundary and deeper or more central entries had lower completion odds. Among completed entries, greater entry depth and more central endpoints were associated with a subsequent shot, whereas passer-pressure measures were not. Stage 1 ROC-AUC was 0.851 for the event-only model and 0.854 for the passer-pressure-enhanced model; the paired difference was 0.0031 (95% CI -0.0006 to 0.0070). Stage 2 ROC-AUC was 0.606 and 0.604, respectively. In this tournament, final-third entry involved a trade-off between execution and short-horizon shot-creating consequence. Passer pressure was associated with whether the ball reached the final third, whereas the location created by completed passes was more relevant to whether a shot followed. Passer-centred freeze-frame measures improved interpretation of entry difficulty but added little held-out-match predictive performance beyond pass geometry; external validation is required before broader benchmarking or decision support.