PPDA falls apart in precisely the matches you wanted to use it for

The pressing metric divides by opponent passes, so a team that barely passes makes any pressing side look formidable.

Passes per defensive action. Look at the denominator and the problem is immediate.

PPDA counts how many passes the opposition completes in a defined area for each tackle, interception or foul the pressing side makes there. Low number, intense press. It became popular because it is calculable from ordinary event data and because it captured something real about how the best pressing sides of the last decade behaved.

Then consider a match against a side that goes long from every goal kick. They complete very few passes in that area, because they are not attempting them, so the denominator collapses and your PPDA looks superb. You did not press well. Your opponent removed the thing you press against.

That is not a rare edge case. It is the standard response to being pressed. Which means the metric degrades exactly where it is most interesting, in the games where pressing was the main tactical question, and behaves best in games where both sides were happy to play through the thirds anyway.

There is a second, quieter distortion. Defensive actions are recorded when contact happens. A press whose purpose is to force a hurried long ball produces no tackle at all, and so contributes nothing to the numerator, while succeeding completely on its own terms. The better your press, the fewer opportunities you get to register the actions the metric counts.

So PPDA is a ratio whose numerator falls when you succeed and whose denominator falls when the opponent adapts. Both movements push in the same direction and neither is the thing you meant to measure.

Tracking data offers alternatives that do not have this shape. Time from the opponent's first touch to the arrival of the nearest presser. Distance the defensive block compresses in the seconds after a turnover. Proportion of opponent passes made under a defined pressure threshold. All of those measure the press rather than the residue it leaves in an event log.

They are also harder to obtain, which is the honest reason PPDA persists. It runs on data everybody already has, and a metric available to all is more useful in public argument than a better metric available to three clubs.

I use it, cautiously, as a rough sorting tool. What I will not do is compare PPDA across two matches where the opponents had different building styles, because at that point the number is describing the opposition rather than the team it is attached to.