Which is the fastest team in the Premier League?

Sky Sports recently shared each Premier League player's fastest speed in 2024/25. Compiling the data by club revealed an interesting fact about Liverpool.

Who would you say are Liverpool’s two fastest players? Mohamed Salah? Luis Díaz? Virgil van Dijk, even though he so rarely ever has to prove his pace?

A recent article on Sky Sports revealed the answer, with what many people might consider a surprising player taking the Reds’ silver medal. “[Curtis] Jones' top speed of 34.77 km/h puts him behind only Luis Diaz among Liverpool players and just ahead of Mohamed Salah. He is 30th among 459 Premier League players overall.”

This is a far from perfect way of assessing speed. Jones might have clocked the second fastest pace among Liverpool players this season but would he beat his teammates over 100 metres? Thirty-two years ago, League Cup sponsors Rumbelows held a competition to find the league’s fastest player, with their 100m final at Wembley.

Tracking data wasn’t invented in 1992, pal. It was much later, hence the race. The showpiece 100m sprint was won by Swansea forward John Williams, who collected £10,000 after winning in 11.49 seconds. A very tidy payday for a player from Division Three in the early 1990s.

Williams’ speed translates to 31.33 km/h, which would sit him between Ross Barkley and Mario Lemina in the 2024/25 Premier League, albeit we’re clearly comparing apples with oranges (or Swans with Wolves). A player’s top speed in a game bears no comparison to what they might sprint without the ball, nor their average for the whole match.

Nonetheless, such data seeps into the public domain so infrequently that it’s interesting to see what it shows on the rare occasions that it does. Here are the kilometres per hour figures for Liverpool players with a decent sample of minutes across the first 11 league matches (as the source article was published prior to the win at Southampton).

The differences are negligible. Converting the statistics into metres per second reveals that Díaz was about 35 centimetres ahead of Ryan Gravenberch in their given peak second. Such margins can matter in elite football, but he’s not leaving him to eat his dust.

With the data for every player, we can calculate the theoretical top speed of all 20 clubs in the Premier League. Liverpool are in the bottom half, until a deeper dig into the numbers tells a vastly different tale.