When, where, and for whom do errors compound? Error sequences, contagion, and individual vulnerability in professional football

Attentional Control Theory: Sport (ACTS) proposes that competitive anxiety arises from appraisals of both the cost and the probability of failure, predicting that an error should be most disruptive when the stakes are already high. We report the first large-scale test of this account in association football, drawing on 1,190,821 StatsBomb open-data event records from 330 professional matches across ten competitions. Three studies examined unforced passing errors. In Study 1 (272,381 passes, 2,202 players), situational pressure and a player’s own immediately preceding error each independently raised error probability: the odds of an error were approximately 21% higher per additional pressure component, and 57% higher following an error than following a success (OR = 1.57). The interaction, however, ran opposite to the ACTS prediction, with pressure narrowing rather than widening the post-error gap (OR = 0.91). Study 2 (54,409 post-error sequences) showed that this elevation was not confined to the player who erred: teammates taking the team’s next pass erred 3.9 percentage points above their own baseline rate, an interpersonal effect roughly half the magnitude of the within-player effect. Study 3 followed chains rather than pairs of consecutive errors. Error probability escalated monotonically with each additional consecutive prior error, from 17.7% following a success to 51.6% at a chain depth of six, and mediation analysis indicated that most of this escalation (91.7%) operated through riskier pass selection rather than degraded execution. Between-player variation in susceptibility was substantially greater for error chains than for success chains, and within every playing position the players with the lowest baseline error rates showed the steepest escalation, an association only partly accounted for by pass selection. Errors in elite football are therefore sequentially dependent, partially contagious, and unevenly damaging across players, suggesting that the cost of an error lies less in the error itself than in what it becomes if allowed to compound.