Hey Google, Who’s the Most Important Player in Barcelona’s Build-up Play?

Google is one of the world's most valuable companies, with an unquestionable hold over the search  engine market, and influence in many other areas. There are many stats that show just how big Google  is, but this hardly seems like something that needs to be proven. Everyone knows Google! 

When you ask Google a question, it searches an index of web pages and returns results depending on  its ranking algorithm, which depends on over 200 parameters. It is likely that many of these are unique  to Google, but Google's founders – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – only wrote an academic paper about one: PageRank.

Page and Brin's impact has not been limited to search; PageRank has been  adapted for many uses beyond the web, from finding the leaders of terrorist networks to optimising engineering based on traffic flow. PageRank gives a measure of the quality of any webpage, or person,  or stop-sign – and it can be used in football too, to find the most crucial player in a passing network, in a metric we will call PassRank.