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18th April 2014
10:00am BST

How far do they travel in a game ? pic.twitter.com/ce6cPNlYcb
— Ray Boyne (@AnalysisGAA) April 17, 2014
Ray worked out that male GAA players covered an average of 11.7km a game compared to soccer players (14.6km a game), ladies GAA players (9.6km), rugby players (7.2km), and participants in tennis (4.9km), basketball (4.4km) and American Football (2.0km).
While a number of mitigating factors have to be taken into account, for example, the time spent by a player on the pitch, the physical demands of the sport (e.g. amount of energy expended making tackles in rugby) and how exactly the distances are covered in each sport (number of sprints, length of sprints etc.), the figures still make for interesting reading.
Also, as a number of people responding to Ray after he posted in on Twitter last night pointed out, the distances of the top three are nearly identical when you break it down into metres covered per minute.
It’s great to see this type of scientific analysis applied to the GAA and the more of it we see in the future the better.Explore more on these topics:

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