It is a speedier game now, that's for sure
With so many individual acts to tracks, mapping Premeir League football is a fiendishly difficult task. Even the many excellent football stat sites out there admit that they are only beginning to get under the skin of the game, with detailed analytics set to be a growth industry for years to come.
However, the latest insight into the game comes to us not from the traditional football stats compilers, but from the International Journal of Sports Medicine.
Last month they published a paper by five UK based sports scientists which looked at the Premier League from the 2006-07 season to the end of the 2012-13 season.
The study was called 'The Evolution of Physical and Technical Performance Parameters in the English Premier League' and it provides some startling figures about how the game has changed in that time.
We've suspected, and the physiques of the players suggests, that speed is an ever more important part of the game now and that is hammered home in this study, the main points of whoch have been cleverly compiled below.
Not only are players sprinting more, but the length of the sprints is increasing, while overall distance covered is being reduced. Succesful passes is also up, as the influence of the possession game makes its mark, and the data goes on to show that short and medium length passes are up, but long passes remain at roughly the same number as they did in 2006-07.
The abstract, and the link to the full study (£) is
here and we assume it will become required reading for all the coaches in the Premier League.
