Back in 2014, a statistic did the rounds.
Someone had clocked Gareth Bale running at 26.8mph when he scored his famous goal
against Barcelona in the 2014 Copa del Rey final, which was apparently quicker
than Usain Bolt managed when he set the 100 metres world record in 2009.
It didn’t matter that the speed attributed to Bale was his top speed, and the one attributed
to Bolt was his average speed over 100 metres. In true internet style: Bale was faster than Bolt.
It may just have been retweet fodder, but can you imagine how irritating it must have
been for professional athletes, to have their careers and dedication and essentially their
life’s work — without wishing to be dramatic about this — belittled in the name of content?
So, no: Gareth Bale is not quicker than Usain Bolt.
Nor is any other football player. But how quick actually are they?
“Undoubtedly, there are some very fast team sport players,
but they’re nowhere near the same or as fast as Usain Bolt”, says Kelly Sotherton,
winner of three Olympic bronze medals in the heptathlon and the 4×400 metre relay.
Jason Gardener, a gold medal winner at the 2004 Olympics in the 4x100m relay agrees:.
“When these players record those kinds of speeds,
they are amazing for a football player, but they don’t compare [to track athletes].”
But where are they on the scale?
“I reckon some of them would struggle to break eleven seconds,” says Sotherton,
when asked to estimate how an exceptionally fast footballer, like Kylian Mbappe or Erling Haaland,
or Alphonso Davies, might fare. That’s not a bad time at all – 11 seconds would
be enough to win a 100 metres gold medal, but all the way back in 1900.
For a present-day comparison,
though, it would probably leave the footballer between 15-20 metres behind
“I think they’d be pretty good to 30, 40 metres,” says Sotherton,
“but the difference is the sprinters can maintain the speed for longer than the footballer,
so you’d see the gap start to open from 50 metres out.
Dina Asher-Smith could probably beat the world’s fastest footballers over 100 metres.”
Okay, so footballers aren’t winning any medals at the Olympics, but how fast actually are they?
Using data from SkillCorner, we can look at who the fastest players were in the Premier League
in 2020-21. SkillCorner’s PSV-99 metric — PSV standing for peak sprint velocity — is a good way
of identifying these, as it captures the players who consistently produce high-speed output.
By that metric, the top five fastest players in the league last season were Kyle Walker (32 km/h),
Marcus Rashford (31.7), Callum Wilson (31.3), Adama Traore (31.2) and Ben Godfrey (30.9).
Usain Bolt’s top speed, clocked between the 60 and 80-metre mark of his world record run
at the 2009 World Championships, was 44.72kph.
Jonas Dodoo, a sprint coach who has worked with Arsenal, Leicester,
the FA and the WSL adds a little more context: “If you can run over 10.5,
even 10.2 metres per second, you’re in the top percentage of male football players,
whereas that’s the same number that we would use for elite female sprinters.”
That’s not a criticism of footballers; their skill set is different.
Athletes sprint once, over 100 metres, then they can have a rest.
Footballers sprint many, many times a game, and very rarely for longer than around 30
metres, and if they’re lucky they will get a light jog as a breather before they have to do it again.
“The performance needs are very different,” says Gardener. “A football player needs to
reach those speeds really quickly. Their training system is going to
be very different because a sprinter is going in a straight line all at one speed,
whereas footballers need the agility to move, sidestep, turn and go. Then they may need
to repeat that speed. That’s the key thing to remember: repeated high-speed sprints.”
Then there’s lateral movement and, as basic as it sounds, stopping — stopping frequently, suddenly,
and to a complete halt without tearing or snapping something.
Tony Clarke is a sprint coach who has worked with Phil Foden and Conor Coady, among others:
“Footballers will have to sprint 10 yards then totally decelerate, stop and then turn
the other way. 100-metre runners don’t have that.” The skill and flexibility required to
do that will naturally detract from the power that a 100-metre runner can concentrate on.
An illustration of this came a few years ago when Cristiano Ronaldo raced against a
professional sprinter and Olympian, Angel David Rodriguez. There were two races:
one in a straight line, over 30 metres, another zig-zag over the same distance.
Rodriguez won the former by 0.3 seconds, Ronaldo won the latter by just under half a second.
It was particularly interesting looking at Ronaldo’s technique in the zig-zag:
he would almost jump into the turns two-footed, using the inside foot to brake
and the outside to push off into the next mini-sprint, whereas Rodriguez,
used to straight lines or relatively gentle bends, used one foot to both stop then push off.
This tallies with something Clarke mentions: “If I was sprinting in a straight line for
10 yards and had to stop and then just go totally left, I’ve got to use one foot to
push off and I could be putting five times my bodyweight on that foot. Therefore I’ve got to
look at the amount of load going through my quadriceps, my glutes, hamstrings. A
footballer will need to work on different muscle groups using plyometric exercises.”
In other words: it’s not really a fair comparison.
Sprinters and footballers are different athletes who dedicate
themselves to developing different skills and performing in completely different ways.