McKay had the advantage of playing two cold weather matches, but still way ahead of everyone else at 13km per 90 minutes.
The match he ran the most against Spain it worked against Australia but still impressive.
Michael Bradley is the only other contender, He played in heat and extra time and still managed 12.5km per 90 minutes.
Felliani,Jedinak did well for big men, Ramirez stood out in a lazy Brazil.
On the other side of the ledger you have the slackers of course goal keepers.
Eto played in one hot match but was much lower than anyone else. 7.5 km.
You have a few central defenders including Tiago, playing sweeeper though is not that demanding.
Where Messi takes the cake, is Argentina had no hot matches, one middle and the rest cold only 8.14 km.
Lazy Fred was at 9km and he got substituted and didn;t have to play out 90 minutes.

http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/statistics/players/distance.html

I've sorted FIFA's stats into a km/match and then ranked the players from most km/match downwards.

Because formatting this in the forum is a nightmare I've only posted the first page of the 13 page document I produced. But anyway the table is all about who ran the most per match.

Matt Mackay 3rd according to FIFA.







Edited by MUNRUBENMUZ: 17/7/2014 10:09:59 AM

If you divide by match then you favour the people who played extra time and people who were subbed off are disadvantaged.
3 of the top 4 are people who played extra time.
If you divide by minute there are a whole of gang of subs who have great rates so you have to sort through the data more. The longer people play the less they run so playing extra time is a disadvantage if you divide by minute.

That's fair enough. I just sorted it into km/match but as you say extra time would give you an opportunity to run more.

Here you go.

Km's divided by minutes played x 60 which gives you average km's run per hour. (I've discounted anyone who played 89 minutes or less.)

Little Matty has done super well.

Again I've only pasted up the first page.

Mackay, Bozanic, Bresh, Jedinak and Oar in the top 50 so a pretty good effort.

Great work.=d>

Not exactly.:-k

At a FFA state Regional Conference, it was shown by the FIFA Technical Committee that there was a link between the more teams ran, and, a lack of success. At the 2010 WC the more teams ran, the worse they performed in the competition. Or, at least, it may have been the average distance players ran in a team.

In Australia's case, they played two games with 10 men. This would have resulted in more work to do in Ball Possession Opposition.

Australia had a high average of distance covered by players. Spanish players covered the least distance.

Seems to be quite a few Germans in that list.

????

That sounds very dodgy to me and does not fit the actual figures. If you single out Australia and Spain yes maybe but while Australia was at the top , Spain was also high. France was amongst the lower ones.
Maybe the problem with the figures is using the subs who have a few minutes, if you include those in the averages that will distort the whole picture. Then I can;t see how that is possible with the French figures they had two subs with higher averages Valbena and Gourcuff with less minutes.
It really is inexplicable.
I saw a large distance deficit between Brazil and Germany in their match.

I only wish instead of flags in those tables they had text for the country names. Then I could've sorted the players by countries and km's covered.

You have included Chadli who played 25 minutes per game, what about Halloran then?

All I did was sort the list into order by most minutes played. Then I deleted anyone with 89 minutes or less.

I guess there could be subs that played as you say above but I'm not claiming it's ready for peer review.


Edited by MUNRUBENMUZ: 18/7/2014 10:30:22 AM

It must have taken some time.

Thanks for presenting the data like you have.