Peak match acceleration demands differentiate between elite youth and professional football players

Abstract

Youth footballers need to be developed to meet the technical, tactical, and physical demands of professional level competition, ensuring that the transition between competition levels is successful. To quantify the physical demands, peak match intensities have been measured across football competition tiers, with team formations and tactical approaches shown to influence these physical demands. To date, no research has directly compared the physical demands of elite youth and professional footballers from a single club utilising common formations and tactical approaches. The current study quantified the total match and peak match running demands of youth and professional footballers from a single Australian A-League club. GPS data were collected across a single season from both a professional (n = 19; total observations = 199; mean ± SD; 26.7 ± 4.0 years) and elite youth (n = 21; total observations = 59; 17.9 ± 1.3 years) team. Total match demands and peak match running demands (1–10 min) were quantified for measures of total distance, high-speed distance [>19.8 km·h-1] and average acceleration. Linear mixed models and effect sizes identified differences between competition levels. No differences existed between competition levels for any total match physical performance metric. Peak total and high-speed distances demands were similar between competitions for all moving average durations. Interestingly, peak average acceleration demands were lower (SMD = 0.63–0.69) in the youth players across all moving average durations. The data suggest that the development of acceleration and repeat effort capacities is crucial in youth players for them to transition into professional competition.

Investigating Acceleration and Deceleration Patterns in Elite Youth Football: The Interplay of Ball Possession and Tactical Behavior

“…These results are partially analogous to those obtained in previous research carried out on elite professional and youth players, which concluded that both Ac and Dec tended to decrease gradually between periods, but also within each period, due to the effect of accumulated physical and mental fatigue [2,14,27,[37][38][39]. The underlying mechanism explaining this difference in Ac/Dec behavior is not clear.…”

“…They typically sprint 600-1200 m at high speed and perform 60 to 100 accelerations. Similar figures are observed for elite youth players [4,14]. The common practice of evaluating professional football performance using the high-speed running threshold (19.8-25.1 km•h −1 ) overlooks the energy expenditure associated with Ac/Dec, thus underestimating a player's workload [15].…”

“…The common practice of evaluating professional football performance using the high-speed running threshold (19.8-25.1 km•h −1 ) overlooks the energy expenditure associated with Ac/Dec, thus underestimating a player's workload [15]. Consequently, Ac/Dec could currently serve as more sensitive and predictive of fatigue and consistent physical performance during matches [5,[10][11][12][13][14]. Understanding the importance of Ac/Dec in football offers insights for coaches and sports scientists to tailor training to address these high-intensity actions.…”

“…Understanding the importance of Ac/Dec in football offers insights for coaches and sports scientists to tailor training to address these high-intensity actions. Acknowledging their significance in workload assessment can improve fatigue monitoring, prevent injuries, and optimize on-field performance [5,[10][11][12][13][14].…”

“…After an initial increase at the beginning of the second half, the trend declines steadily [2,10], but there is disagreement on quantifying these variables during a match. Some studies examine changes every 15' [1,24,26,27,29,30], while others prefer 10' [14] or 5' intervals [10,25].…”