Does anyone know the record for the highest measured speed of a soccer ball kicked from a standstill? Of course it's not like tennis or baseball where you can put a radar gun on a serve or pitch, but I'm sure they've done experiments to find who can kick the ball hardest. I googled and couldn't find anything. And as a side note, are some players generally acknowledged to have the most powerful shots? I would think big guys like Adriano would be advantaged, but I don't pretend to be knowledgeable about such things.
I'm not sure if the ball was still or who the player was but he had a shot on goal clocked at 104 mph. This was a few years ago in the Champions League. It made a top 10 plays of the day.
Somebody else in the States will probably remember but it seems like one year during the MLS All Star game they did put radar guns on a shot contest. It seems like Zach Thorton won with a shot around 90 miles per hour.
Most shots are in the 40-60 mph range, with occasional shots going into the 70s and 80s. Anything faster than 85 mph is extremely rare. The all-time record shot (of those clocked) was by Eder, in the 1982 World Cup match between Brazil and the USSR, at 110 mph. The hardest that I know of in the last decade or so is a 96 mph shot by Sunday Oliseh, with Roberto Carlos a close second at 94 mph.
Thanks. Was the 94 mph Roberto Carlos shot the famous bending one against France? BTW, how is Cal Tech's soccer team?
ya that was a few years back in the all star challenge... thorton is beastly mamudo diallo owned that year
i remember that MLS all star challenge. i remember they were clocked in the like their 50's or 60's but i don't remember that well. anyways here's a link that u guys might find interesting http://www.soccerballworld.com/Physics.htm
does anyone know where i can get a video clip of that R. Carlos kick against France. i would really appreciate it, thanx.
It also depends how far the ball has to travel. Short, 10-yard blasts will go much faster than any 35-yarders. There's several soccer shows in South America that routinely measure the speed of shots and I've seen a few that go well into the 110-120 mph range. Of course, they're all well inside the box.
Actually, Adriano was clocked by the Italian newspaper Gazzetta dello Sport. The result was on one of his free-kicks, he hit the ball at about 105 mph. Much higher than Roberto Carlos. Zico also had a hard shot in his day.
Any numbers on Rooney? I know he probably does not have a very high number yet, but he hits an awful lot of hard shots... harder than most other shots consistently but not exactly record setting. Very interesting stuff on that physics article... now I have a headache... thanks alot.
Can't say how fast it was going, but a couple of years ago I saw (on TV) Djibril Cisse score from about 25 yards out during the run of play on an absolute bullet of a shot. The ball looked like it was on a frozen rope- never lost speed, never dropped, and never got higher than five or six feet off the ground. By the time the keeper had even turned in the direction of the ball, it was bouncing on the ground in the goal. Hardest shot I've ever seen for sure.
Try this, just go down to Roberto Carlos. I hope it works: http://www.futebolthebrazilianwayoflife.com/video.shtml
Since people are talking about the famous free kick vs. France, no it wasn't that shot. That free kick was actually fairly slow. I never saw a speed figure, but it looked to me like it was only in the 50s or 60s.
Beckham? is that a joke? Maybe the penalty kick that he missed in Euro2004 Nobody has mentioned Koeman from Holland and Branco from Brazil.