It is 380 miles by road from Liverpool to Inverness, and by air from Liverpool to Paris, about as far as 15 marathons. What’s this got to do with football? Nothing, really, except it might help us get our heads round an athlete such as Steven Gerrard. Those 380 miles are roughly the distance Gerrard covered last season while playing for club and country, a 10th of it at sprinting speed or close.

Your eyes tell you the Premiership is getting faster, fiercer, more fatiguing and more furious. So do the stats. ProZone, the performance analysis system used by leading English clubs which uses video to detail every movement of every player in a match, every 1/10th of a second, has the numbers to demonstrate the lung-bursting nature of football in the modern era. Gerrard is among the most dynamic of today’s top players but he is less the exception and more the rule. English football is full of running men and the figures show the game continues to speed up.

ProZone has just completed the analysis of the 2005-06 Premiership season and the data is as eye-popping as one of Gerrard’s box-to-box bursts. The average distance covered by players in matches has changed little in the last four seasons but the amount done at top speed has almost doubled. What ProZone class as “high-intensity activities” — runs made by players at three-quarters of sprint pace or faster — have increased from 627 per team per match in 2002-03 to 1,209 in 2005-06, and the ground covered by players while sprinting has increased by 40% over four years. A sprint is classed as a run made at quicker than seven metres per second, equivalent to running 100m in a sharp 14 seconds.

It is not long ago you could play in the engine room of a major English football team and be like George Graham, whose nickname was Stroller. The old coaching instruction, “let the ball do the work”, may no longer be relevant. It is impossible to be a top player without hard labour. Compared with an England icon of just a few years ago, Alan Shearer, footballers such as Gerrard will cover three times the distance in a match at sprint pace. An analysis of a Gerrard performance against Arsenal last May showed the Liverpool player running 11.79km (seven miles, 573 yards for those who prefer things in old money) per game, with 1,070m of this at “high-intensity” pace. ProZone are yet to release individual data from 2005-06 but say Gerrard has further quickened since then.

Speed can be the enemy of subtlety, but not here. Not only is English football becoming more physically intense but the stats suggest it is also growing in sophistication. ProZone measure something called “final-third entries” — the number of times the ball is played or dribbled into the attacking third of the field — and discovered last season, although the game continued to become faster and there were more passes, that “final-third entries” dropped but without significant change in the number of goals and shots. This suggests more cat-and-mouse football is being played, with teams keeping the ball patiently in midfield before launching more sudden, selective and successful attacking strikes.

Such a style of play is felt to be continental, while dynamism and workrate are held to be homespun qualities. Are our sides playing a more effective “European” game while retaining age-old English advantages? This could explain how, in two consecutive seasons, sides from outside the Premiership’s top three have reached the final of the Champions League. “Our analysis indicates an interesting trend as it shows that while the game is getting quicker, teams appear to be more probing and patient,” said ProZone’s Barry McNeill. “It appears that teams attack either with pace and purpose or following a prolonged period spent testing the opposition’s defence. The tactical approach of absorbing pressure and counter-attacking, increasingly popular in the modern game, has undoubtedly affected both the total distance covered in terms of a team’s defensive workrate, and the high-intensity workrate when attacking.”

In 2005-06, midfielders were measured as the Premiership’s hardest-working players, with right midfielders, such as Gerrard, the most energetic of all. The average ground covered by those in this position, 11.49km per game (seven miles, 246 yards) was not too far short of the figures for Gerrard. Centre-backs did the least running but even they averaged a fraction under 10km per match. Right midfielders also did the most fast running, an average of 147 heart-thumping “high intensity” bursts per match and covering 310m flat out. More managers are joining the likes of Steve McClaren and Sir Alex Ferguson as ProZone users. Monitoring players’ output offers clues as to who needs to be dropped, rested or used differently.

ProZone even have a contract to monitor referees. “We’re working closer than ever before with more teams at all levels of the game, assisting the improvement of not just the physical fitness of players but also how the coaches shape the tactical and technical aspects of a team's approach,” McNeill said.

The average recovery time Premiership midfielders enjoy between “high-intensity activities” in games is 40 seconds. As a manager he’d have loved all this sweat, but it makes you wonder how Stroller the player might have coped.

Key statistics

• In 2005-06, the average right-sided midfielder covered 11.49km per game, more than any other position
• He also made 147 fast-paced runs, 44 being flat out sprints with an average recovery time of 39 seconds between activities
• The least active players were centre-backs, who covered 9.96km per match
• On average, a striker had four shots per game, a central midfielder 45 passes and centre-backs 21 headers and 33 interceptions, the highest for each category

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