As January transfer window signings go, a 78-year-old American track and field coach is unconventional. For Manchester United and Ruben Amorim, even if it wasn’t the head coach’s call, it actually makes a lot of sense. The appointment of Harry Marra, on a consultancy basis for a few weeks, is designed to improve United individually and collectively at covering ground efficiently and repeatedly.

Marra, who graduated from Syracuse University in 1974 with a master’s degree in physical education and exercise science, is best known for coaching USA decathlete Ashton Eaton to gold at the Olympics (London 2012, Rio 2016) and World Championships (Moscow 2013, Beijing in 2015, where he also got the world record, since beaten). Eaton still holds the world decathlon best over 400 metres (45.00 seconds), and in the top 25 decathlon performances of all time, his 10.23s 100m ranks second.

Marra’s relationship with Eaton dated back to the early 2010s when they worked together at the University of Oregon, where Marra also coached Brianne Theisen to NCAA titles and collegiate records. As a heptathlete, she went on to win an Olympic bronze (Rio 2016) and world silvers (Moscow 2013, Beijing 2015).

Marra also spent over 10 years working simultaneously with the San Francisco Giants baseball team and as USA Track & Field’s decathlon coach.

In 2018, Marra coached Indonesian sprinter Lalu Muhammad Zohri to gold at the World Athletics U20 Championships. With a personal best down to 10.03, Zohri is on the cusp of becoming only the 11th Asian man to break the 10-second barrier in the 100m.

What’s this got to do with Manchester United? Quite a lot. It’s a sign of Marra’s coaching quality that, over 40 years he has had success with teams, groups and individuals of varying ages, backgrounds, starting levels and resources. If the critique is that his age makes him out of touch, consider the open-mindedness and adaptability he has needed to work with top athletes and teams for longer than Amorim has been alive.

More importantly, running more and better is something Amorim wants United to do. “If you want to win the Premier League, you have to run like mad dogs,” he said in December, before a 3-2 defeat against Nottingham Forest, his fifth match in charge. “If not, we are not going to do it (win), that is clear. It’s impossible to win the Premier League without a team that, every moment, runs back, runs forward. Even with the best starting XI, without running, they will not win anything”.

The sports science-led revolution of the late 2000s catalysed a transformation of the Premier League into Europe’s most athletic league, and it’s still increasing in intensity. One study of Premier League games between 2006 and 2013 showed 30 and 35 per cent increases in high-intensity and sprint distances. Another paper found rises of 12 and 15 per cent in the same metrics from 2014-15 to 2018-19. Data from SkillCorner shows the rise has continued. This season, high-intensity distance match averages are 16 per cent up on the 2018-19 campaign. Sprint frequencies have risen by a fifth and sprint distance over 23 per cent.

“It was not me, it was the club,” said Amorim of the appointment of Marra. “We are always trying to bring experienced people to share knowledge with the staff, to understand the body, to understand how you can improve our players. It was not me, it was not something new. He’s not there to coach the team, he’s there to coach the staff about everything about the running, et cetera. It’s a simple thing that we are used to doing to improve as a club.”

Amorim wanting to build a team on intensity and physicality is not new. Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool and Bournemouth all had or have identities underpinned by pressing and aggressive running. His predecessor, Erik ten Hag, wanted United to be “the best transition team in the world”. He also turned to specialist coaching, appointing Benni McCarthy as a striker coach before Marcus Rashford produced his most prolific season in 2022-23 (30 goals in all competitions).

Importantly, any specialist sprinting coach is not going to make players significantly faster. Acceleration, power and top speed can be refined but not taught. Those attributes owe so much to a player’s physiological predisposition. That is shown by the career trajectory of elite sprinters, whose talent is obvious in childhood and before deliberate training, and they reach world-class or peak status much earlier than other sports.

Instead, a specialist coach should help identify and minimise issues in mechanics that might lead to injury. Last season, United had the most time-loss injuries in the league and struggled to name a consistent back four. Harry Maguire and Mason Mount, who were injured multiple times, are examples of “problem cases” and “repeat rehabbers”, terms used by Jonas Dodoo, a performance consultant with Brighton & Hove Albion and Newcastle United who specialises in movement and sprint coaching and analysis.

Dodoo, whose background in sprint coaching came in rugby and then athletics, first worked as a performance consultant in football in 2016 with Derby County. He cites Theo Walcott and Tariq Lamptey — two players with notable pace — among the players he has helped rehabilitate. He describes the coaching model he uses as: “Brake, plant, separate. That’s what they need to be able to do.”

Marra coaching Eaton and Theisen in Eugene, Oregon in 2013 (Doug Pensinger/Getty Images)

“They need to be able to brake aggressively and efficiently so that they can plant effectively and separate from their opponents, and run fast,” says Dodoo. “You need to be conditioned to create the types of forces needed, but also need efficiency, and to do that repeatedly — 40, 60 times in the game you might have to accelerate, and the forces are even more stressful in a body in a deceleration.”

Completely altering a player’s mechanics would take the kind of time, training and resources that football rarely offers, but there are still gains to be had when coaching sprinting. “You want to make sure that they can get into the positions and postures needed to decelerate, accelerate and to change direction well,” says Dodoo. “That’s the premise you start (coaching) around. In terms of sprint ability, you can make very quick and effective changes to the first three steps that make sure that they know how to create the forces in the right direction.

“If you can accelerate very well on your first three steps and if you know how to stop aggressively in your first three steps of deceleration, then that can have a fundamental effect on your physical qualities and performance.”

The nature of football and its game phases (with so much settled possession, set pieces and 22 players on a 105m x 68m pitch) means players very rarely hit their actual top speeds in matches. It is the reason, at PSV’s academy, their benchmark for first-team level performance in a 30m sprint test also includes a threshold for how fast players need to cover the first 10m.

Faster and more efficient accelerations and decelerations buy players time and space (or reduce it for opponents). “If your gear one is really aggressive, then actually the rest of it can be done scanning and preparing for the next action,” says Dodoo.

United’s academy — in Rashford, Alejandro Garnacho, Amad and Anthony Elanga (sold to Nottingham Forest in July 2023) — has developed some of the best straight-line runners and accelerators in the division. “Elanga is the model,” says Dodoo, who co-owns Speedworks Training, a sprint coaching business that developed a database of athletes “across football, NFL, elite and international rugby. We’ve got 5,000 runs for 3,000 players. What we consider as being very efficient and effective is what he (Elanga) produces in his running”.

Elanga again. 😮‍💨 pic.twitter.com/aqk1TYLvBI

— Nottingham Forest (@NFFC) December 26, 2024

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In the first two months of this season, Rashford, Garnacho and Elanga all made the list for the top 10 highest speeds in a Premier League game — because players rarely hit top speed, calling them the ‘fastest’ would be a misnomer. That Amad did not might be because of his gait. He stands out for taking a lot of short steps with low heel lift (and has a choppy arm style reminiscent of fellow Ivorian and 100m sprinter Marie-Josee Ta Lou) whereas Garnacho takes big strides.

That difference in mechanics may explain their difference as dribblers too. As senior United players, Amad has completed 46.7 per cent of his Premier League dribbles, compared to just 32.5 per cent for Garnacho. “He’s (Amad) closer to the ground and having a high stride rate means he can make adjustments very quickly,” says Dodoo.

Amad (22 years old) and Garnacho (20) are two members of a relatively young United squad. Midfielders Toby Collyer (20), Manuel Ugarte (23), and Kobbie Mainoo (19), plus centre-back Leny Yoro (19) and striker Rasmus Hojlund (21) were either playing academy football in England or have made moves to United from other European leagues in the past two seasons.

Those inside the club feel that the hardest part of stepping up to the senior, Premier League level is the physical demands (more than the technical/tactical ones) and subsequent injury risks.

Dodoo says teams need “a smart rotation system with those young players. Especially, the more of a forward and the more of a speed merchant that player is, even more reason to have some way of keeping them loaded but not overloaded”.

Sprinting coaches are not new within football. Former Team GB sprinter Darren Campbell worked at MK Dons and with Andriy Shevchenko when he was at Chelsea. Similarly, Leon Reid, another former international sprinter, has worked on the running technique of Brighton players. Three NFL sides — the Jacksonville Jaguars, Tennessee Titans and Houston Texans — have all employed ‘directors of speed development’, though there is a more natural fit for a mechanics/sprinting coach there, given the NFL’s combine and 40-yard dash.

Garnacho has demonstrated his sprint ability this season (Paul Ellis/AFP/Getty Images)

The Premier League is into its era of specialist coaches: hybrid coach-analysts, set-piece coaches and position-specific coaches. The return on investment of a coach who can keep players fitter (and possibly make them move better) has the potential to be huge.

Internally, Amorim has been critical of fitness levels, and United’s high-intensity numbers have dropped off compared to last season.

Running more (and harder) is not automatically a good thing, and requires the context of tactics, game state, opposition style and quality, but as Dodoo points out, “the manager’s model is real high intensity, and the players need to be conditioned for that. If you get conditioned to that way of training with one manager, the next manager bringing a more intensive model (means) the conditioning of the team needs to go up”.

It is not quite the same approach that Ten Hag took when he had his players running many kilometres after an away defeat to Brentford in August 2023 (to show them how much they were ‘outran’ by). Availability, though, is the best ability, and United must improve there if they are to implement the style Amorim wants, let alone turn their season around.

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(Top photo: Manchester United training this month; by Zohaib Alam/MUFC/Manchester United via Getty Images)