Manchester United dropped points against Tottenham and critics were quick to question their effort and application, using the team’s physical statistics to make points. Speaking on Sky Sports, Jamie Redknapp said: “There’s a pattern I don’t really like when I watch teams, and that’s when – and the stats don’t lie – the other team runs more than you. In the Premier League right now, I feel there are a couple of non-negotiables: you’ve got to run more than the other team if you want to win, or at least get close enough that it doesn’t make that much of a difference.
Tottenham ran five kilometres more than Manchester United.” Physical metrics such as distance run and number of sprints are increasingly accessible and easy to understand, so have fallen into common use. It’s become a common theme that, when a big club fail to meet expectations, pundits and commentators look to their running metrics in search of one catch-all explanation. Liverpool and Chelsea were the targets of similar judgment last season.
How much of a correlation is there between a team running lots and that team being successful? While the numbers may not be complex at face value, answering this question is, which probably highlights that such metrics are so nuanced in a team sport that it probably isn’t best practice to tie too much significance to the topline figures. The first way we can assess it is by comparing the Premier League table to the rankings of distance run and high-intensity distance.
Yes, this is pretty simple and rudimentary, but it’s a place to start. Last season’s Premier League table hardly mirrors the rankings for distance covered or high-intensity distance per game. Sure, Arsenal and Manchester City were high for overall distance, but the teams who came third to eighth had middling – at best – outputs in this respect.
The teams that finished in the top 10 averaged 4,363km over the season; the teams in the bottom 10 averaged 4,332km. In the grand scheme of things, a difference of 31km between those averages is rather small. Again, there’s a slight difference between the average high-intensity distance for top-10 teams (338.7km) and those in the bottom 10 (328.4km), but we’re talking about an increase of 3%.
Similarly when perusing data from this season, it’s difficult to see much of a link. Looking at it in relation to the table does ignore that success is relative, however. Of course Burnley were not going to finish seventh in the table just because they came seventh in the distance rankings.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
