On August 28th 2024, our international PhD student Runqing Ma received the Routledge Young Researcher Award for the presentation “Enhancing Football Passing Networks: A Network Analysis of the 2022 World Cup”, performed at the 14th World Congress of Performance Analysis of Sport, hosted by the Middlesex University in London. The work was focused on a modified passing network where edge weights are based on the value of passes. This approach allows for the assessment of the role of players in team dynamics through networks that depend on the contribution of passing quality, providing a more comprehensive evaluation of attacking performance.