Who is Liverpool's Prince of Sprints?
Does sprint data tell us more than distance covered statistics? They might but not in the way you would necessarily think.
The previous edition of this newsletter looked at the distance covered by the teams in Liverpool’s Champions League matches. It’s now time to look at the sprinting numbers.
We have an issue here that the previous article did not. The distance a player covers isn’t up for debate. It is fact. What constitutes a sprint seems to vary between data providers. Here’s a list from a recent Driblab newsletter
We can see that Hugo Ekitike averages 11.3 sprints per league game. Yet based on the below figures from a Sky Sports article that was published earlier the same week, Liverpool’s number 22 had averaged 11.9 per match.
That difference could be down to the data being cut off at different times, not that the Reds played between the two dates. The below figure for Cody Gakpo also suggests he should be on the Driblab list when divided by his games played (assuming he’d be classed as a forward).
Regardless, sprint data drips out here and there without much in the way of a regular source or any context. Another recent example was provided by CIES Football Observatory, who posted the top 20 Champions League players for maximum speed for five different positions. Liverpool had a man in four of the categories, shown here:
It’s unsurprising that ‘Side midfielders/wingers’ is the one classification in which the Reds have no representative, as it has been the most problematic position. The area of an Arne Slot team that most needs pace and trickery has largely lacked it in 2025/26.
Having started on the wing against Galatasaray in the league phase, Jeremie Frimpong could arguably be counted, albeit four of his five Champions League starts have been at right-back. Wherever he plays, only three men in the study - Gonzalo Garcia, Oleksii Kashchuk and Anthony Elanga - have covered a higher percentage of their distance in the highest speed category.
Have the likes of Cody Gakpo and Mohamed Salah been strolling down the flanks this season? We’ll need to interrogate the match-by-match data on Fotmob.
