Data Analysis: Physical demands in football

Football is a highly demanding sport in terms of the physical demands. Whereas other sports often afford either more dynamism and pace or endurance, the football game requires players with a good endurance who are also capable of accelerating quickly.

Different positions have different physical demands. In the following data analysis, we will take a look at the position-specific physical demands in football. In order to do so, we will use statistics and different studies to give evidence. Moreover, we are going to explain the impact of tactics on the physical aspects and why physicality is of such big importance in football.

Physical aspect: endurance

In comparison to other sports, the playing time of football is quite long. As a consequence, endurance plays an important role for performance. And although sprints play an important role, they only represent a small amount of the total distance covered of any player. According to Stolen et al. (2005), for instance, sprints only make 1-11% of the total distance covered during a game.

According to Broich et al. (2008), elite football players cover an average of 11,393 metres per game. Therefore, endurance is of big importance. As one can see in the following graphic (Mallo et al. 2014), the total distance covered is dependent on the position. One can clearly see that wide players cover more distance than central players.

The table below (Mallo et al. 2014) shows how the total distance is split upon the different categories standing still, walking, jogging, running, high-speed running and sprint.

Independent of the position, all players cover the most distance by walking. And apart from the forwards, all players cover the least distance with sprinting. Due to that, football is mostly aerobic. Mayhew and Wenger (1985) even stated that football is 88% aerobic in nature. Nevertheless, with its high-speed running and sprints, football also includes high-intensity efforts and therewith is an intermittent sport.

Physical aspect: pace

But besides endurance, one of the mos