Hudl Physical Metrics: Introducing Repeatable Max Speed
Recruitment teams and coaches prize exceptional max speed. It’s a metric that reflects a player’s underlying physical qualities – largely determined by genetics, particularly muscle fibre composition and neuromuscular efficiency – and while it’s trainable to an extent, it’s less malleable than other physical attributes. That makes the measurement all the more important: a metric for a quality this stable has to hold up to scrutiny.
Until now, Max Speed was the only speed measure in Hudl Broadcast Tracking Data. It records the highest speed a player reaches in a match, and across multiple matches, their single highest reading. However carefully our tracking models are refined, a single top speed always leaves room for statistical noise.
That’s why Hudl is introducing Repeatable Max Speed: a measure built to what a player can reproduce, not what they managed once.
What is Repeatable Max Speed?
Rather than relying on a potential outlier, Repeatable Max Speed uses a player’s top speed from every match in which they play 60+ minutes, discards the lowest half of those readings, and averages the rest. This limits the effect of outlying numbers, allowing recruitment teams to compare speed fairly across players.
“In sports science, a single peak reading is rarely the number you want to solely rely on when making a decision. What matters to a recruitment team is the speed a player can reproduce across matches, and that’s what Repeatable Max Speed is built to show.”
Why did we choose this methodology?
Two decisions sit behind the metric: which appearances count, and how to combine them. Both are based on a case study of [18,454] appearances by [728] players across the Premier League and Championship.
The first finding set the 60-minute threshold. Across 8,537 Premier League appearances, average match Max Speed rose with minutes played until around 60 minutes, then levelled off. For the same players, appearances of 45–59 minutes were around 0.9km/h lower, which is consistent with players having less time to reach their top speed.
With the threshold set, we tested 14 ways of combining match max speeds. Each faced three tests:
- Reliability. We split each player’s matches into two groups and calculated Max Speed separately for each. Do both groups rank players the same way?
- Stability. Over five, 10 or 20 matches, how far does the figure move from the full-season value?
- Agreement. Does it rank players in a similar order to independent tracking data?
The single season-high scored lowest on reliability [0.55]. Averaging a fixed number of top matches, an approach used elsewhere in the market, scored better but proved unstable on small samples: on five-match samples, a top-three average drifted [1.5] km/h from the full-season figure, almost three times as far as our method [0.6].
The reason is structural. Over five matches, a top-three average counts 60% of a player’s games; over 30, it counts the fastest 10%. The figure changes meaning as the window changes.
Averaging every match proved most stable, but quiet matches drag it down: it describes a player's typical level, not their top speed. Of the methods designed to capture top speed, the best 50% strikes the strongest balance between reliability and stability. Because it always uses the same share of matches, it means the same thing over five matches or 50.
On the platform, Repeatable Max Speed is calculated from whichever matches you select, and shows how many matches it’s based on. Percentiles compare players against others in their position with at least 10 matches of 60+ minutes.
What it means for recruitment
For recruitment teams, Repeatable Max Speed changes what a speed figure can be trusted to do.
It always draws on the same share of a player’s appearances, so a full-back with 12 matches can be compared directly against one who has played 35. It stays comparable whether you filter to the last five matches or a full season. And because it stabilises quickly, you reach a dependable value sooner, meaning you act on it earlier in the recruitment process.
We can see its value when applying it to various league contexts. Jan Virgili ranks just inside the top 70 for max speed alone, but Repeatable Max Speed shows the explosive winger is able to replicate his fastest sprints much more consistently than almost any other player in the league.
The same can be seen in both 2. Bundesliga and Ekstraklasa examples. Many of the top performers of Repeatable Max Speed would ordinarily have been lost in the noise of traditional max speed metrics. As a result, recruitment teams quickly get a reliable on who will hit their top speeds on a weekly basis, rather than surfacing players who produced it on an isolated occasion.
Available Now
Repeatable Max Speed is available now in the Hudl Statsbomb platform, included at no extra cost in every subscription, and can be accessed via a separate Physical Metrics API package.