Erling Haaland’s goalscoring statistics this season have been talked about so much that they are well-known to any keen Premier League observer. But away from his goals per game and touches per 90 minutes, some other numbers have been getting pundits, fans and even his peers talking too: his speed.
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The internet loves a fast footballer, especially one who can cap a breathtaking sprint with an equally thrilling goal. And in Haaland’s case, that has led to a series of videos shouting about just how fast Manchester City’s Norwegian striker is.
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But how fast is he? And how is the 22-year-old able to get his 6ft 4in (194cm), 14-and-a-half-stone (94kg) frame moving at a rate that so often leaves opponents trailing in his wake?
(Photo: Matt McNulty/Manchester City FC via Getty Images)
First, the numbers.
At Borussia Dortmund last season, Haaland recorded the third-fastest sprint in the Bundesliga, clocking 36.3 km/h (10.1 metres per second). Premier League speed statistics are closely guarded by its clubs, but data tracking company SkillCorner makes an assessment by extracting physical tracking data from broadcast footage.
As a proxy of a player’s top speed, they measure the 99th percentile of their peak sprint velocity (PSV-99).
Haaland averages a PSV-99 of 30.5 km/h, which is about average for a forward, with several wide attackers ahead of him. However, considering that he attacks central areas, his top speed is all the more impressive, with only Marcus Rashford of Manchester United ahead of him for top speed among players in the top flight who can be considered centre-forwards.
Now, the science.
Jonas Dodoo is the head coach of Speedworks Training. A former track and field sprint coach, he now works as a consultant for the Football Association, England’s Rugby Football Union and professional clubs across the Premier League, German Bundesliga, NFL and Major League Baseball. He worked alongside Andreas Beck (former high-performance coach, now at Eintracht Frankfurt) at Dortmund while Haaland was there, conducting video analysis sessions to look at players’ running techniques and deciding what improvements needed to be made (if any).
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Dodoo describes Haaland as a “phenom” in terms of his “application of speed skill” and the way he’s now “maximising his expression of physical attributes in tactically appropriate ways”. But when he started working with the team at Dortmund, they had two major questions for him about Haaland’s running style: “One was about his body kyphosis — the hunched-over back you sometimes see when he runs; and the other was about the side-to-side action of his arm cycle — if you were watching him run from the front, you might see some swaying from left to right.
“The swaying I would address by giving him more space in his hips, and a bit more control around his lumbar spine — around his belly button. As for his upper spine, if I was trying to maximise his acceleration, I would maybe want to address it. But apart from that, it’s not a key performance limiter, so I would leave it alone.
“That’s the skill of a good coach — knowing who needs to address that spine and who doesn’t. When you’re on the way up (as a player), you leave alone the things that aren’t really bothering performance. But when you’re on the way down, you sometimes have to address them, because they’re your only opportunity to have an easy win.”
With Haaland, Dodoo says he would leave his hunched-over style alone until the time when it starts to take away from his ability to “project, switch or be reactive” — the three areas the coach uses to measure sprinting efficiency.
“Projection is about how much stride length and hip displacement they get. Basically, how far do they travel with each step? We know the optimum amount that each athlete should travel relative to their height,” Dodoo says.
“Switching is about how well they exchange their limbs. We’ve got two running legs, one leg is pushing while the other leg is getting ready to push. So we’re either pushing or we’re preparing, and there is a synchronicity, a symmetry, and a reciprocal nature between your limbs. There are very inefficient ways to move your limbs and there are very efficient ways to move your limbs, and we can measure that.
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“Reactivity is about using your ankles as springs. Some people use their ankles like force amplifiers. And some people use their ankles as force dampeners. Dampeners are going to be losing energy and amplifiers will be giving you back energy.”
These three concepts relate to three areas of the body, Dodoo says.
Projection is focused around the hips and thighs, giving you the power to establish your stride length. Switching is focused around your core and trunk, which gives you stability and the control of your pelvis to exchange your limbs. And reactivity relates to the ankles and knees, which give you the stiffness and spring-like action.
“Haaland clearly has all three,” Dodoo says. “And that’s what’s amazing about him, because taller players can struggle with the switching and heavier players can struggle with the reactivity.
“Yet, in running off the half-turn, running in a straight line, accelerating, stopping, starting and going again, he quite easily finds the balance between those three areas. And that’s the key thing we’re looking for. We’re not trying to just have someone who is great in one area. The body works best when all three areas work in synchronicity and there’s a balance between the three. He clearly has that balance.”
Could Haaland get even faster if those issues around his posture and arm cycle were addressed?
“Potentially,” Dodoo says. “You can be more posturally balanced and you could potentially be more efficient if we addressed some of the things we’re talking about, but they are very much ‘nice to haves’ and not ‘need to haves’. If he was struggling with his ability to project or to exchange and switch, I would maybe ask the question of whether his upper-body posture is taking anything away.”
But for now, Dodoo believes the potential risks that come with making changes to Haaland’s “natural capabilities” — as well as the time and work that would be needed to do so — make it a path that’s not worth taking at this stage of his career.
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How then, does Haaland compare to an elite track-and-field sprinter?
“Sprint coaches have forever talked about the need for a high knee lift,” Dodoo says. “And field-sport coaches (ie, football) have struggled to develop it or never really believed in it.
“I say that there’s a middle ground.
“What Haaland does to maximise his projection is that he will push his leg far back behind him when on the ground and he will have a relatively high knee lift, so he always has a big range of motion between his legs. That’s one of the reasons his projection and his stride length are so big.
“What else do sprinters do? When they have a big range of motion, they don’t take ages to reach it, they cover that large range of motion — those big angles — in a short time. And they do it with more of their legs under and in front of them than they do with their legs predominantly behind them. Again, Haaland does this really well.
“And then, when they put their foot on the ground, they have a very stiff ankle and knee complex, so that they can get lots of free energy. And he does that well, too.
“So Haaland ticks all of those boxes in the same way that I want a track sprinter to tick them. Would a track sprinter have their knee a bit higher and spend less time on the ground? Yes, but that’s because they’re running on a harder surface firstly. Secondly, the sprinter can afford to get their hips higher and spend more time in the air because they’re not expecting any contact. Neither do they have to be prepared to be agile, whereas Haaland does.”
The seemingly unstoppable Erling Haaland (Photo: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images)
When Haaland is making a defensive or transition run and not expecting contact, Dodoo says the striker gets his hips and knees even higher, making himself look more like a track sprinter.
And what about his peers? How does an in-full-flight Haaland compare to those he’s sharing a pitch with?
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“There are some players who are very good at creating separation between themselves and the opponent,” Dodoo says, “and that’s because they can accelerate. They might not be able to get to as high a top speed as others, but they maximise the fact that most of the game is played in small spaces and they can accelerate and decelerate well.
“Then maybe you see more of your wide players who can actually hit a relatively high top speed. They may or may not be able to accelerate, but they can hit a top speed and they can cross and control the ball at really high top speeds.
“When you look at Haaland, he can do both. His ability to repeat sprint — repeatedly accelerate and make runs again and again — is enhanced by the fact he’s got a very high top speed.”
And what are the keys to Haaland’s top speed?
“For a tall man, he optimises the range of motion between his legs well,” says Dodoo. “And he moves across that range of motion relatively fast. That’s essentially the equation for velocity: large range, short time.
“Some other players do that too. The difference is, he’s got the leverage of being 6ft 4in. Usain Bolt (who is 6ft 5in) came into the sprinting world and dominated because he could do the same things the short sprinters were doing, but he had an extra half a foot on his leg, which made a big difference.
“Haaland has got the leverage of Bolt — an elite sprinter — and also the engine and the ‘software’. So he’s got all of the advantages and he’s putting them all together. That’s why he’s going to dominate until such time that he loses form, gets hurt or loses his confidence.
“I don’t see that happening for a long time.”
The comparison to Bolt is one that’s been made before with fast footballers, and it’s one that routinely gets shot down by anyone (everyone) from the world of track and field.
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That, says Dodoo, is because no matter what the numbers might suggest, there is no comparison in terms of speed.
Haaland could consistently run around 10 metres per second in training at Dortmund, which Dodoo agrees “is clearly very fast”. But, he adds “an elite female sprinter running 11 seconds flat (for the 100m) would run close to, or at, 11 metres per second. That’s faster than 99 per cent of football players in the world. An elite male sprinter in a race will run 12 metres per second at their top speed.
“The problem is, it’s apples versus oranges. It’s always, ‘How fast is an elite sprinter from a static start and how fast is Haaland running with a rolling 20 metres?’.
“In a relay, with a 20m rolling start, Bolt would run 8.7 seconds for a flying 100m. That’s where the comparison should be.”
(Top photos: Getty Images; design Eamonn Dalton)
