To many people, soccer is just 22 players running after the ball. That’s a serious oversimplification, but the most popular sport on the planet really is largely made up of the running work of match participants: the playing surface is small and the field is large, so athletes have to move around a lot for the entire 90 or sometimes 120 minutes of the match,
Modern top-level soccer is full of all sorts of technologies that calculate basic and advanced statistics. For example, players’ mileage per game, their average speed, number of sprints and more. Professionals use this data for in-depth analysis, but it can also be used to answer very simple questions, such as how much athletes run per game.
In the fall of 2021, the Center International d’Etude du Sport (CIES) conducted a résearch on soccer players’ running distances based on statistics. The scientific work focused on several metrics, including distance covered, running speed and sprints. The CIES staff had a rich sample: they collected data on 7,855 matches from 31 men’s professional tournaments in Europe and America.
The study shows that players from European teams cover more distance on average than their counterparts from South American clubs – a difference attributed to a more intense style of soccer. The gap is notable, but not radical: In Spain’s top league, players average 10.3 kilometers per game; in Brazil’s top league, it is 9.6 kilometers.
Important: Only field players are taken into account. Goalkeepers spend most of the match in a static position, and their mileage is incorrect to compare with players in other positions, although there are exceptions. In the 2014 Champions League match between Barcelona and Atlético Atlético, Catalan goalkeeper Jose Pinto ran 5.5 kilometers, just 1.3 kilometers less than Lionel Messi, the Blue Granada striker.
Another trend reflected in the study: center field players run the most. If you’re not a fan of running, choose other roles – midfielders average 10.6 kilometers per game. Central defenders are the least moved among field players – 9.2 kilometers per game.
Outfielders or wingers cover the most distance at high speed. For high-intensity runs (faster than 19.8 kilometers per hour) they averaged 932 meters per game, and for sprints (faster than 25.2 kilometers per hour) – 211 meters. Central defenders had the lowest numbers for the same parameters.
An important factor affecting the running of players is age. There are individual anomalies like 36-year-old Englishman James Milner: Liverpool midfielder almost always finishes the match in the top mileage, if the coach allows him to spend a full match on the field. This is a case where the exception only confirms the rule – the older the athlete, the fewer runs he gets and the less often he accelerates.
In traditionally younger leagues like the Dutch league, players on average run more than, for example, in the Turkish first division, where retired players from all over Europe come to play. CIES specifically emphasizes the correlation between the activity level of strikers and their age: the older the striker, the less he runs and accelerates less.
