Soccer’s fastest sprinters are quietly some of the best pure athletes on the planet. They’re not quite Usain Bolt (his peak was 44.72 km/h, which is silly), but the gap is smaller than you’d think — and these guys are doing it after 70 minutes of running around, with a defender hanging off their shirt, while trying to do something useful with the ball at the same time.
With the 2026 World Cup kicking off this summer across the US, Canada and Mexico, we went digging through the actual primary data — Premier League optical tracking, Bundesliga’s AWS Match Facts, La Liga’s Mediacoach numbers, and the CIES Football Observatory’s Champions League rankings — to figure out who’ll be the fastest players on the field this tournament.
A few things up front. Different leagues use different tracking systems, so you can’t really compare a Premier League 37 km/h to a Bundesliga 37 km/h down to the decimal. We’ve used each player’s best confirmed sprint from 2025–26 league or Champions League play, and we’ve kicked out everyone whose country didn’t qualify or who got cut from their squad. (RIP Cameroon. RIP Italy. Sorry, Jeremie Frimpong.)
Counting down from 15 to 1.
15. Bazoumana Touré
Ivory Coast 🇨🇮 (Hoffenheim) 35.98 km/h
The 20-year-old Hoffenheim winger hit 22.36 mph in the Bundesliga this season and went straight into Ivory Coast’s World Cup squad despite only making his senior debut in October 2025. His coach reckons he runs about as fast as Usain Bolt did in the 100m final at Beijing 2008. He doesn’t. But it’s flattering, and it’s close enough that we’ll allow it.
14. Nuno Mendes
Portugal 🇵🇹 (PSG) 36.10 km/h
A left-back who attacks like a winger and recovers like a sprinter on the back end of an interval session. CIES had him as the fourth-fastest wide defender in the entire Champions League this season. He missed most of the 2022 World Cup with a thigh injury, so this is his proper debut at full speed.
13. Erling Haaland
Norway 🇳🇴 (Manchester City) 36.20 km/h
The biggest, scariest centre-forward in the world of soccer is also one of its fastest. Haaland clocked 36.20 km/h against Arsenal this season — Manchester City’s quickest individual sprint of the campaign. He’s 6’4″, 88 kg, and accelerates like a much smaller man. Norway are at their first World Cup since 1998 because Haaland scored in all eight qualifying matches.
12. Vinicius Jr
Brazil 🇧🇷 (Real Madrid) 36.21 km/h
The fastest player in La Liga in 2025–26 according to Mediacoach data, which is a stat that has caused a lot of arguing among Real Madrid fans because his teammate is… well, the next guy on most people’s lists. He’ll be on the left wing for Brazil and is the closest thing this tournament has to a player who genuinely terrifies defenders on the dribble.
11. William Osula
Denmark 🇩🇰 (Newcastle) 36.29 km/h
A late bloomer. The Newcastle striker only earned his Denmark recall in March after a winner against Manchester United, and he was eligible to play for four different countries — Denmark, England, France, Nigeria — before the Danes locked him in. Three Newcastle players in this top 15, and we haven’t even got to the other two.
10. Pedro Neto
Portugal 🇵🇹 (Chelsea) 36.32 km/h
Neto is the second Portugal player on this list and the kind of winger that turns a fullback’s hamstring into a 50/50 proposition by the 70th minute. He’s been playing the best soccer of his career at Chelsea this season and is one of the few Portuguese attackers Roberto Martínez has never had any doubt about.
9. Achraf Hakimi
Morocco 🇲🇦 (PSG) 36.40 km/h
According to CIES, the fastest full-back in the entire Champions League this season. Hakimi missed chunks of the year with injury but his top speed has barely budged — he hit 36.40 km/h in Europe and 35.60 km/h in Ligue 1. Morocco are the dark horse most people are quietly tipping for a long run, and he’s the engine of everything they do.
8. Yan Diomande
Ivory Coast 🇨🇮 (RB Leipzig) 36.46 km/h
Bundesliga Rookie of the Season. He’s 19. He’s already faster than most professional sprinters running 60m indoors. 12 goals and eight assists in 33 Bundesliga games for a struggling Leipzig side, and he’s going to a World Cup. Watch the matchday compilation of his sprint against Bayern when you have five minutes — it’s borderline rude.
7. Anthony Elanga
Sweden 🇸🇪 (Newcastle) 36.50 km/h
The second-fastest player in the Champions League this season behind only his Newcastle teammate (you can probably guess who). Elanga only joined Newcastle last summer from Nottingham Forest, where he was already known as the fastest player in the Premier League by other players. Sweden are at this World Cup because of a Nations League pathway most soccer fans had to look up; Elanga is one of the reasons they’re not just there to make up numbers.
6. Alphonso Davies
Canada 🇨🇦 (Bayern Munich) 36.51 km/h
A complicated one. Davies has been clocked over 37 km/h in the past and was once considered the fastest soccer player alive. He tore his hamstring against PSG in the Champions League semifinal in May and is racing the clock to be fit for Canada’s opener. He’s in the squad. Whether he plays is anyone’s guess. If he does, he’s the home nation’s most exciting player by a country mile.
5. Djed Spence
England 🏴 (Tottenham) 36.62 km/h
When Thomas Tuchel announced the England squad, he was asked who the fastest player in it was. He said Djed Spence “loves defending one-on-one” and is the quickest by a margin. Spence is the surprise pick of the squad — four caps for England, one good season at Tottenham, and Trent Alexander-Arnold’s spot opened up at exactly the right moment.
4. Bradley Barcola
France 🇫🇷 (PSG) 36.72 km/h
PSG’s quietest superstar. While the world talked about Mbappé leaving and Dembélé arriving, Barcola just kept ticking along as the fastest player in the entire club. He hit 36.72 km/h in the Champions League this season and goes to the World Cup as France’s first-choice left winger — which, given France’s depth, is approximately the most competitive position in soccer.
3. Gabriel Martinelli
Brazil 🇧🇷 (Arsenal) 36.74 km/h
Arsenal won the title and Martinelli was a big part of why. He clocked his top speed against Newcastle and made the Brazil squad despite genuinely brutal competition from Vinicius Jr, Neymar (yes, he made it), Estêvão, Rodrygo, Raphinha and the rest of the cast. Two Brazilians in the top 12 fastest players at the World Cup. That sounds about right.
2. Micky van de Ven
Netherlands 🇳🇱 (Tottenham) 37.38 km/h
The fastest centre-back in the history of Premier League tracking, and probably the most absurd athletic profile in the soccer world. Van de Ven is 6’4″, weighs 78 kg, and runs 37.38 km/h. That sprint, against Brentford in January 2025, is still the Premier League’s fastest since data collection started in 2020. He hit 37.10 km/h again this season. The Netherlands open against Japan on 14 June and Van de Ven is the reason they can defend with a high line without panic.
1. Anthony Gordon
England 🏴 (Newcastle) 37.92 km/h
The fastest player in Europe, full stop. CIES Football Observatory clocked Gordon at 37.92 km/h in the 2025–26 Champions League, ahead of every winger, every full-back and every striker in the competition. That’s about 23.56 mph. For context: that’s faster than the average pace Usain Bolt held over his world-record 100m (he averaged 37.58 km/h but his peak was 44.72). Gordon doesn’t peak that high, obviously, but he’s hitting a higher sprint speed than Bolt’s entire-race average — and he’s doing it in soccer cleats, on grass, with someone shoving him from behind.
England’s been waiting for a winger this fast for about a decade. He’s wearing the number 18 shirt. Mark him.
The Runners We Lost Along The Way
Some of the world’s fastest soccer players won’t be in the US this summer. A moment of silence for:
- Jackson Tchatchoua (Wolves, 37.30 km/h): Was the fastest player in the Premier League this season. Cameroon lost their playoff to DR Congo.
- Jean-Mattéo Bahoya (Frankfurt, 37.16 km/h): Holds the all-time Bundesliga record. Didn’t make France’s senior squad — too much competition.
- Oliver Burke (Union Berlin, 37.00 km/h): Scored a Bundesliga hat-trick. Scotland left him out anyway. Six years since his last cap.
- Karim Adeyemi (Dortmund, 36.65 km/h): Cut from Germany’s squad after a difficult season.
- Loïs Openda (Juventus, 36.86 km/h): Sat on Juventus’s bench all season and missed out on Belgium.
- Destiny Udogie (Tottenham, 36.41 km/h): Italy lost to Bosnia in the playoff final. Third World Cup in a row they’ve missed.
What About Mbappé?
You may have noticed the world’s most famous fast player isn’t in the top 15. This is the section where you yell at us.
Kylian Mbappé’s career-best top speed is the much-quoted 38 km/h, but that figure was set during his PSG era around 2019. His 2025–26 maximums are 35.04 km/h in La Liga and 35.70 km/h in the Champions League (CIES has him ninth in Europe). He’s still spectacularly fast. He just isn’t, on current data, faster than the 15 above.
He’ll still probably win Player of the Tournament. Soccer is annoying that way.
Why Are Soccer Players This Fast?
A quick aside for the running nerds. Elite soccer players’ top speeds have crept up about 2 km/h over the last decade, and the people who actually study this stuff (sport scientists at clubs like Liverpool, Bayern and PSG) point to three things:
- Better acceleration training — heavy sled pulls, resisted sprints, plyometrics. (Same kind of thing covered in our resisted speed training guide and plyometric exercises for speed roundup.)
- Year-round S&C programmes — modern academies start sprint mechanics work at age 12. If you’ve never thought about your own sprint mechanics, our how to start sprinting guide is the right place to begin.
- Better surfaces and boots — modern pitches are firmer and faster than they were 15 years ago.
The big one is acceleration. Top-end speed only matters if you can get to it inside the 20–30m window most soccer sprints happen in. Mbappé, for example, hits 90% of his top speed in 2.6 seconds — that’s the fastest measured first-step acceleration in soccer.
Translation for runners: if you’re trying to get faster on the trail or in a 5K kick, do less long slow running and more sled pushes and short hill sprints. Flying sprints are another underused tool for closing the gap on your top-end speed without the injury risk of all-out track work. For some perspective on how slow we mere mortals really are compared to these guys, our breakdown of average human sprint speed is a humbling read.
You can blame the World Cup for the homework.
