Just how good are soccer players at running?

My first year in college I did both soccer and xc. I only trained with the soccer team and ran at the xc meets. This was my first xc running, before that it had all been soccer. In xc i ran 28:16 for 8k, off of all soccer training. One year later I gave up soccer and only ran xc, put in 40-60 miles in july aug, then 70 - 80 durring the season. With only that type of training I ran 26:03. Although I feel i should have been in the mid 25s that fall oh well. I would say when i was playing soccer I was not in condition aerobically, we did some kind of sprints after most practices. In soccer you go from basically walking(or a very very slow jog) to running pretty hard for short amounts of time. I would say it most resembles intervals rather than some kind of base running.

Øyvind Leonhardsen had a alent for runner possible good enough to most cetainly aend up under 4 minutes for the mile he had an oxygen uptake of 80.5 ml/kg/min hat is quite good for mid'

Even though a goalkeeper doesnt run as much as the other footballers, El G used to be one, which may or may not say something.

I have to find the interview he stated that in, I know some people might not believe me, but he said in it that he was pretty good.

yeah el g was a soccer player up to I think it was 15-16

mark plaatjes played soccer until he was 16, then took up running. did pretty well, i might add.

everyone here seems to assume that they run 8 miles equally distributed over 90 minutes. in reality its a combination of all out spurts and jogs, making it MUCH harder, more like a speed mid-distance workout.

actually that would be wrong soccer players are actually more fit

1. there avg run is 7 miles while basketball is only 2.9

2.Recovery to work rate is 1:3 and do more short sprints than basketball players

3.the game field is obviously bigger

4.natural coordinative ability is easier to hands than to feet hence soccer is more tough to master than basketball

5

but that being said basketball is not a horrible sport or something it is a tough sport but not as much as soccer we ca

This has entirely to do with the specific player and his training. If you are a player who runs 2-6 miles every morning, then you might be decent. If you just get exercise at practice and it's mostly sprints, then you'll be a terrible runner.

I played one or two years of soccer as a kid and recently took it back up with some friends. Thanks to my running background I have all the energy in the world, but just need to hone my skills/coordination/touch. Some of these other guys try to run with me and they really struggle to run at moderate paces. They can jog and they can sprint, but anything in between is hard on them. This will be true of any soccer player who isn't regularly putting in miles at moderate paces.

But if you're a guy who can crank out a 6 mile run every morning and then practice soccer in the afternoon, well, you're probably also a good runner. That ends up being 40ish MPW with intervals and jogging thrown in. Those kinds of guys might easily go sub-18 in a 5k or sub-5 in a mile.

It's important to note that the muscles you use in soccer are somewhat different from running. Soccer demands more from your quads, glutes, back, and core in general. This is added muscle and tension a runner probably doesn't want in those areas. Soccer also requires that you lock your ankles for hard shots and this tends to end up strengthening your ankles, but the hallmark of a runner is snappy, elastic ankles.

I think it's hard to be good at both simultaneously, but with a little bit of a background in either a person can make a decent transition over time.

If only the Dutch decided to switch from soccer to track, we'd see 100s of sub 1:42 800 meter runners, and 100s of sub 3:30 1500 runners just from there.

i would say they are likely to be better than athletes from other sports (at least from the start). soccer players have the easiest transition to running. even if many of them aren't putting up incredible times, it's the only sport i can think of where coaches regularly have their athletes run 1 or 2 mile time trials.

for everyone else, that kind of endurance training is outside the scope of the sport. football/hockey/basketball are about explosiveness, which is entirely different than a 2 mile tt. when doing other sports before running, our team's strength trainer would specifically say running a mile was a waste of time. so even if soccer players have minimal running related training, it's still more than the rest of us.

People think soccer players are great runners because most people are bad runners. Talk to your coworkers about your recent races - they think taking 1st at your local Sunday morning 5k with an 18:30 is a better performance than a 14:45 and taking 6th at a D1 meet. Point is, they don't know the difference between a 4 minute and a 6 minute mile - they run 11's. All they know is that you're faster than them.

Now what I do find interesting is that outside of the US most people play soccer, so almost all runners are going to come from that background. However, in a lot of places (specifically I am talking about Europe) space is more limited so technique is going to advance the players more so than athleticism, at least early on. Even when space isn't a huge constraint, you still see lots of 5 a side (calcetto) which is more technical and removes the mileages from the equation. This is the opposite of the US where we are starting on full sized pitches and the real athletes do well because they simply outrun and outlast the more technical players. As they reach high school when competition is a bit more fierce, these athletes that have gotten by on endurance will slowly be phased out and will look for another sport. Since they've essentially been doing low mileage mid distance training and have natural ability, a lot of this is going to translate and they will have a pretty good foundation to match their natural ability. So yeah, you're going to have guys and girls joining the track team and running pretty well which will progress this myth that they are good because they are soccer players, but in reality they are fast because they weren't good enough.

I have two soccer player kids.

The 14yo boy is high-level, top of DA and coaches appreciate him being able to hustle the whole game, and his speed. He ran 5:12 in summer track and could crank out a 17:40 or so (#3 on our varsity XC team at State)

The 15yo girl is OK in soccer: just between JV & V but did XC this year. She was 21-flat at the end of the season with 6:20 mile speed. This put her at #6 to #8 on varsity XC.

I seem to have anomalies as soccer kids but looking comparatively at some of the kids on their teams, many should be within one minute slower. I bet the boy has 5 sub 19:30 runner teammates and the girl 5 sub 22:30 teammates. That's not bad and would beat some low-level XC teams around here.

Idk if this has already been said but I would guess there is some sort of bias in the stories you hear about soccer players’ success in running. It makes sense that you would hear a higher percentage of the success stories of soccer players switching to running, while hearing only a small number, if any, of the stories about soccer players that end up sucking at running.

This would make it seem like soccer players have a better Janice of being good at running even if their odds were the same as an average person.

This article states that 1300m in 4 minutes is typical for professionals.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/active/11063463/Test-yourself-are-you-as-fit-as-a-Premier-League-footballer.html

Hi. I saw many researches about this and results can be really different according to tests. Some players like Ronaldo showed amazing results. I like football, quite interesting game to watch and play. I usually follow all news on https://soccerwagerz.com/football-predictions/ site, very interesting!

Digging into the past with this one.

Professional footballers from Europe's top leagues are outstanding runners/sprinters. They are not WC track level but they are very good. They have outstanding endurance and very good top end speed at pretty much every position except GK. The difference is that they have to run a lot of 30-40m repetitive sprints throughout the 90 minutes. Basically one long interval session lasting 90 minutes. A lot of top sprinters would be gassed by halftime as they don't have the endurance to last a match.

Even an average professional footballer in the UK is going to make so much more money than even Mo Farah over a career that there is very little incentive for someone on track for this to switch to running.

Here's an anecdote for you:

In 2007 I coached at a small private high school in Texas. One of my athletes, Valerie Lindenmuth, a junior, had taken second in the state in individual cross country and also second in the high jump. She told me she had a friend on the soccer team, also a junior, who had never run track but was probably a better runner than she (Valerie) was. She talked the girl into coming out for the team halfway through the track season. The new girl won the State Championship in the 1600 and broke the state record in winning the 3200. She then won the individual State Championship in cross country, and the next season, she won the mile again and broke her own state record by 20 seconds. (10:54). She got a small scholarship to the University of Texas and as a junior she took 2nd in the NCAA Indoor 5k and ran 15:51. She competed in the 2020 Olympic Marathon trials , I think her marathon PR was around 2:36 or 2:38. Her name was Mia Behm.