An international break provides a moment to take a breather from club football, but the embers of lingering narratives from the weekend’s Premier League games still glow.
Liverpool’s 2-1 loss away to Brighton in Saturday’s early kick-off was compounded by its UK broadcaster TNT Sports’ commentary that Arne Slot’s side were outrun by the hosts in their total distance covered on the south coast — and had also been outrun by the opposition in 26 of their previous 30 Premier League games this season.
Chelsea were humbled with a 3-0 defeat at Everton later that afternoon, with BBC highlights show Match of the Day’s coverage revealing that the west Londoners had been outrun by the other team in every Premier League game played so far in 2025-26. “What does that tell you?” was the rhetorical question posed by expert analyst Alan Shearer in response to the statistic.
The answer?
Not that much.
Running statistics have long been a topic of discourse in football. We have grown obsessed with measuring the speed demons of the game, and we love to shower praise on midfielders whose stamina must mean they have an extra pair of lungs.
The issue is that these statistics are dangerously devoid of context in isolation, and are often used selectively within the media when a team have a bad performance or are in a patch of poor form. Medical staff and sports scientists within a club can use this information to manage a player’s physical load or detect injury risk, but using running numbers as a barometer of team success can be a slippery slope.
Let’s use raw distance covered as an example.
It is largely suggested that the team who run the greatest distance out of the two contesting any given game have shown greater “fight and desire” or “grit and determination”, but this makes little sense from a football perspective.
Liverpool were outrun by Brighton and lost that game (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images)
A player or team might run less precisely because of their intelligent performance on the pitch, retaining possession and moving the other side around — forcing said opposition to make lung-busting runs in an attempt to close them down and win the ball back.
For example, Argentina winning the 2022 World Cup was underpinned by Lionel Messi’s artistry on the ball that saw him spend much of each game walking — assessing where there was a chink in the opposition armour, before springing into life and exploiting the space in typical fashion.
Likewise, the above narrative lamenting Liverpool’s running numbers this season becomes a little less reliable when we learn it was subsequently identified that they got outrun in 26 of their 38 Premier League games in 2021-22 — a campaign which saw them accrue 92 points, one fewer than title winners Manchester City.
Data from SkillCorner provides good support for this point in the Premier League.
By a team’s average combined distance run per match in the current season, the top five read — in order — City (105.7 km), Leeds (105.1 km), Crystal Palace (104.5 km), Brentford (103.2 km) and Brighton (102.5 km).
That list of teams spans from second place to 15th in the 20-club table, meaning there is no pattern to lean on when looking at these numbers.
In fact, mapping the relationship between points and average distance run per game since that 2021-22 season shows that there is no correlation between the two in the long term. High-speed running distance barely adds any predictive value either.
Simply, a team’s success cannot be measured by the numbers delivered by a GPS sports vest alone.
What running numbers can offer is an indication of a team’s playing style.
For example, few would be surprised to see that Bournemouth top the list as the side averaging the most sprinting distance in an average game this season — with Andoni Iraola’s side still implementing a breathless approach that combines aggressive pressing and direct play on the ball. By contrast, Everton and Sunderland rank the lowest by this measure, with both sides’ defensive work grounded on compactness and discipline — shuffling across and closing space as opposed to relentless man-for-man pressing.
Again using data from SkillCorner, the real fun can come from combining those physical metrics with tracking data to provide that extra layer of context to show a player’s or a team’s approach — particularly out of possession.
Time spent in a high, medium, or low block can be investigated alongside the compactness of a side’s out-of-possession shape to show which clubs go hunting for the ball high up the pitch, and which prefer to sit back. A player’s inclination to engage with an individual opponent and force them backwards can be a good proxy of qualitative, intelligent pressing, more so than the sheer volume of high-intensity runs made.
Just because there is more of something does not mean it is better.
The ever-increasing physicality of the Premier League means that the lens has become more focused on the intensity with which a given team play. To be clear, combining such physical intensity with strong tactics and a clinical edge in both boxes is arguably the ideal concoction for success. It is just that physicality alone is not the primary factor to win a game of football.
A lack of physical intensity may well affect player performance and the implementation of those tactics.
However, using running data as the sole stick to beat teams with must be met with caution.
Spinning a narrative depending on the outcome of a game is a naive and risky way of interpreting statistics.