Age-dependency of sprint top speeds

TRACKTICS is having a long-term partnership with Fundación Real Madrid Clinics (FRMC) where we equip hundreds of football schools under the Real Madrid Brand Umbrella with our GPS performance trackers. In the scope of this partnership we have collected performance data of tens of thousands of youth players, which amounts to what we think is probably the largest data set of its kind.

Based on the Real Madrid dataset we have devised a new model of sprint top speed age-dependency, using simple restricted cubic spline regression (see the figure above). While we have used the resulting model in the scope of our partnership with FRMC we have not yet got the time to wrap up the model in a publication, which would be interesting for a larger audience, as our model is probably the most extensive modelling attempt of sprint top speed age-dependency ever conducted.