The Physical Demands of Football Fitness

One of the main objectives of any training professional, coach or manager should be to know what the demands of their sports require in order to prepare their athletes in the best possible way.

In the particular case of fitness training or physical preparation, the conditioning variables are ones that are continually scrutinised, & require high levels of planning from a short, medium and longer term.

Recently, it was reported that the French World Cup Winning forward, Kylian Mbappe clocked an incredible 22.4mph whilst running from his own 6-yd box to score on the counter-attack for Paris St. Germain versus Marseille in Ligue 1. The explosive striker, who was revealed as the fastest player in world soccer, marked another milestone with a very memorable & rocket-launched goal!

The consistent high performance of this sport depends on multiple factors, of which the technical, tactical, psychological and physical aspects, as well as the interactions between them, are vitally important.

During a 90-minute game, a professional footballer usually travels around 10-12km intermittently, performing between 1000 and 1400 short-time actions, generally less than 5 seconds and rarely above 10. A significant number of these activity changes are due to changes of direction.

Only 1.5 to approx. 3% of the total distance is covered is with possession of the ball, which generally equates to ~ 200 meters.

Wingers are players whose positions usually perform higher values ​​in this data set. It has been suggested that around 70% of the distance covered is below 11km/h and that 200-500 meters are accumulated above 23km/h.

There are differences in the distance covered at different intensities depending on the position, with midfielders consistently accumulating the greatest distance.

Furthermore, full-backs, wingers and strikers are positions with greater distance at high intensity and sprinting levels. Interestingly, across levels of play, full international players cover 28% more distance in high intensity zones and 58% more sprinting distance (+24% in women’s football) than non-international professional players.

One research study performed by Faude et al. (2012) showed how 83% of goals were preceded by an explosive action (i.e. jump, sprint).

Specifically, in the German Bundesliga, it was found that the most frequent action before scoring a goal was the straight-line sprint without a ball (45%), followed by jumps (16%), dribbling and changes of direction (6% each).