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Beyond the Box Score: Uncover Defensive Data & Transitions to Attack with Hudl Assist+

Mar 12, 2025

3 min Read

With new defensive stats from Hudl Assist+, you’ll find the answers you didn’t know you needed.

When your team doesn’t have the ball, everyone is a defender.

Assist+ tracks defensive moments for soccer, shining a light on their impact like no other platform has before. You’ll be able to easily find and monitor defensive actions like blocks and interceptions.

And possibly most important, you can dive deep into what happens when the ball changes hands—aka, transitions to attack.

Why You Need Defensive Stats

Chances are, your defensive players have never been able to see data proving how their performance impacts the game. But with Assist+ tagging the key defensive stats for soccer, their blocks, interceptions and transitions will be documented. Every moment from every game. And with these tags being reported in your insights, you’ll see the whole picture of performance, not just one side of the ball.

But these stats go beyond your line of defenders. It’s also important to know how your forwards are performing defensively. Are you winning interceptions when you’re close to your opponent’s goal?

What about after they win the ball—do you know what your players do then? The last thing you want is them winning it and immediately losing it. You want to win it and see what your team can do next. That’s where transitions to attack comes in. The results from those transitions matter for every player, whether they’re your last line of defense or your best forward.

If your team has a high percentage of sequences that end with transitions to attack, as well as a low percentage of sequences that end with transitions to defense, you’re going to win games. And reaching your goals on those percentages will be much easier when your players can see exactly what those numbers are and how they impacted them.

How Assist+ Makes It Easy to Analyze Defensive Stats

Transitions to attack might be your new favorite stat. Why? It packs a knowledge punch. By applying this one filter from Assist+ to your team’s most recent game or last season’s worth of games, you'll immediately be able to analyze how good you are at winning the ball and keeping it.

Open a game (or games).
Scroll down the insights module on the right side of your screen, and click “Transitions to Att”.
Immediately, all the corresponding clips will be funneled into outcomes.

From there, you can get more specific, analyzing all the possible attacking transition situations. Using the insights module, you can filter to see a specific player’s attacking transitions, or even how many are in each third of the field. Find answers to questions like “How good are we at winning the ball in the attacking third?” and “What does my star midfielder do when she wins the ball?”

Another option is to reverse funnel this stat. Here’s what we mean:

Open a game (or games).
Scroll down the insights module on the right side of your screen, and click “Shots”.
The game will now be funneled down into all the moments within any sequence that ended in a shot.

You can see where those attacks started from, including if those shots came from transitions to attack and what the percentage was.

Seeing the other defensive stats is just as easy. Once you start narrowing in on blocks and interceptions, you’ll get a clear understanding of your entire team—unlike with a traditional box score.

In soccer, there are only four scenarios: your team has the ball, your team just won the ball, your team just lost the ball, or your team doesn’t have the ball. By applying just one or two Assist+ filters, you can see exactly how good your team is at those scenarios.

Ready for Assist+ to make tracking soccer defensive stats easy for your team? Contact our sales team today.