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I was curious about the in-depth player stats from yesterdays game, Brazil - Croatia (specifically to assess Ivan Perisic's impact in the game) and came across a bunch of sites that provide basic stats like goals, cards, possession, shots, etc. I found the UEFA homepage particularly informative. However I did not manage to find a single source that has the distance covered by each player at the World Cup. This is a very common stat in Europe that's frequently reported at half-time and post-game (e.g. here are stats for Champions League 2013-2014).

How to find distance covered for players during the World Cup?

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  • This statistic by FIFA for distance run by players in a match - has to be hyper-inflated. Let's do the math! A football field is 105m long for a world cup and 75m wide. In order to run the 9500m (almost 6 miles) as reported above - a player would need to run the length of the field - call it 100m - 95 different times....in a game that lasts for 90 minutes. That is basically a full length of the field once every minute.....and NO PLAYER comes close to doing that. First, NO PLAYER even runs the entire field more than a couple of times (if at all!)......from goal line to goal line because of the
    – user4824
    Jun 21, 2014 at 14:18
  • Yeah this is interesting, but the stats say a couple Iranian players today ran 11K meters. That's running at less than 5 mph for 90 minutes straight. Seems fairly reasonable. Guys can run 42 km (marathon) in 2 hours. I haven't yet seen any good reason to believe FIFA's distance stats aren't correct. Jun 22, 2014 at 6:14
  • The players are on the field for 90 minutes and if they walk with an average speed of 5 km/h which is not too fast they would pass 7.5 km for the time of the match. Obviously they run for most of the time of the playing time, sometimes jogging and very often with 80% speed with occasional 100% sprints. By the way, the most exhausting part of the match are the duels not the running itself. The stats are very realistic and I would like to know if the stats are for running only or total movement (including walking).
    – user4859
    Jun 24, 2014 at 14:56
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    Of interest, here is how the distance covered is calculated.
    – Mendhak
    Jun 24, 2014 at 17:11

1 Answer 1

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Distance Covered is being tracked at FIFA World Cup 2014.

On FIFA's website, detailed player statistics are provided for each match. For example, here is the page for Match 1 between Brazil and Croatia on June 12. Scrolling down to the Official Document section, you'll find Croatia player stats (.pdf) and Brazil player stats (.pdf). These documents contain the distance covered for each player; for example, Neymar, the Man-of-the-Match for Brazil, covered 9,538 meters during the game, contributing to the 102 km team total for Brazil.

Ivan Perišić of Croatia covered 10,472 meters of the Croatia's 109 km total in the match.

You can also check the "Tracking Statistics" PDFs listed in the "Official Documents" sections of each match to find distance traveled per player.

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