Total distance is the least useful number a tracking vest produces

Eleven kilometres covered tells you a player was on the pitch, and almost nothing about what he did while he was there.

Eleven kilometres. Congratulations, you jogged.

Total distance is the number that escaped the laboratory and reached the general public, which is unfortunate, because among everything a tracking system records it is close to the least informative. It sums across intensities. A metre walked back into shape and a metre covered at full sprint to close a passing lane count identically, and those two metres have nothing in common physically or tactically.

Worse, the total is heavily determined by things the player does not choose. Match tempo. Whether the game was open or a series of stoppages. How much of the ball your side had. Play against a team that keeps possession and you will run further while doing less, because chasing is cheap in distance and expensive in nothing else.

The number is also confounded by minutes on the pitch in a way that everybody knows and half the graphics ignore. Per ninety adjustments help. They do not fix the tempo problem, and they introduce their own distortion for players who come on late into an already stretched game where the distance rate is inflated for everyone.

What matters is the shape of the distribution, not its sum. How many efforts above a high speed threshold. How many accelerations from standing. How long between repeated efforts, because a player who produced twenty sprints spread evenly across a match did something very different from one who produced twenty in two ten minute spells. Those distributional facts are what coaching staff actually look at, and they are almost never the ones shown on screen.

There is a reason the total travels so well. It is one number, it rises with effort, and it flatters the honest hard worker in a way audiences enjoy. It also gets weaponised. A midfielder gets criticised for a low total in a match where his job was to hold a position and deny space, which is a job that involves not running.

I would ban the standalone total from graphics and replace it with high intensity distance and effort count. Two numbers, still simple, and they describe work rather than movement.

If a metric can be improved by jogging pointlessly for ten minutes, it is not measuring contribution.

It is measuring the odometer.