Soccer players, not surprisingly run the most
I recently ran across an interesting post on Gizmodo (How Far Do You Run Playing Different Sports?), which answered the often asked question of how far do athletes run in popular sports , such as baseball, basketball, football etc. I had always heard that soccer players run about 13 miles during a full 90-minute game, nope that’s a myth…
As the article points out there are many age-old myths of how far players run during certain activities, but thanks to modern sports review and coaching technologies, we can now answer that question with a fair bit more accuracy.
Read the full article for a more complete picture , I have summarized the details in this table below
| Sport | Avg. Run Distance (player) | Max. Speed | Notes. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basketball | 2.72 miles | n/a | myth: 5 miles/per game |
| Football (US) | 1.25 miles | 21.5 mph | Avg. NFL game only has 11 minutes of actual action |
| Tennis | ~ 3 miles | n/a | lots of fast direction changes |
| Baseball | ~ 0.5 miles | n/a | mostly walk/running sprinting |
| Soccer | 7 to 9.5 miles | n/a | not really a surprise here |
| Golf | 3.8 ~ 5.5 miles | n/a | mostly walking in an 18-hole game |
I wish they went on to cover more sports, like Rugby, Ice Hockey (I know they skate but something equivalent), and other sports. Of course running isn’t the only thing that makes a great player in a lot of these sports, each sport has a bunch of other skills that an athlete needs to be good at to be a star performer.