Erling Haaland and the Force–Velocity Profile of an Elite Striker

The Athlete in One Paragraph

Erling Braut Haaland (b. 2000, Leeds, England; raised in Bryne, Norway) is a striker for Manchester City and the Norway national team. Listed at 1.95 m and ~94 kg, he is — by anthropometry — closer to a basketball power forward than to a stereotypical European centre-forward. Since his move to Manchester City in 2022 he has averaged above one league goal per match across multiple seasons, but the more interesting case for sport science is how the goals arrive: short, decisive accelerations into the box, ball arriving at body, finishing motion completing in a single phase. That mechanical pattern is the surface expression of an underlying physiological variable — the force–velocity (F–V) profile — that this article unpacks.

The Physiology — what a force–velocity profile actually measures

Every athlete who sprints, jumps, or accelerates a body mass is performing a ballistic task. The output of that task can be decomposed into two extremes:

• Maximal force (F₀) — the theoretical force the athlete could apply at zero velocity
• Maximal velocity (V₀) — the theoretical velocity the athlete could reach against zero load

Plot force on one axis, velocity on the other, and the linear relationship between them defines the athlete’s F–V profile [1, 2]. The slope of that line — F₀/V₀ — describes whether the athlete is force-dominant (steep slope, big push, slower top end) or velocity-dominant (shallow slope, lighter push, higher top end). A separate variable, maximal power (Pmax), is the parabolic peak of F × V across the line [2].

For ballistic actions like sprinting, jumping, and the plant-leg phase of finishing, performance depends on both the magnitude of Pmax and whether the F–V slope matches the task demand. Samozino and colleagues showed that an imbalance between an athlete’s actual F–V profile and the theoretical optimum for their task degrades ballistic output even when Pmax is high [1]. In other words: producing power is not enough — producing it across the right ratio of force to velocity is what separates an elite sprinter from a strong cyclist who can also run fast.

In sprinting specifically, F–V profiles tend to be sport-specific. Haugen and colleagues compared elite sprinters, jumpers, and team-sport athletes and found that elite sprinters cluster toward higher V₀; strength-event athletes (throws, weightlifting) cluster toward higher F₀; and team-sport athletes — football and rugby in particular — sit between the two, with significant individual variation [5]. The football sub-population is heterogeneous on purpose: a winger and a centre-back are both “footballers,” but their physical demands, and therefore their optimal F–V profiles, are not the same.

The Case — Haaland as a horizontal-force machine

The mechanical demand of a striker like Haaland is dominated by short-burst horizontal acceleration: 5 m and 10 m sprint splits more than 30 m or 40 m flying speed [3]. In Haugen, Tønnessen, Hisdal and Seiler’s review of sprinting in elite football, the fastest improvements in performance over a player’s career came not from raw top-end velocity but from acceleration capacity — the early-phase F-dominant portion of the F–V curve [3]. For a 1.95 m / 94 kg striker, that acceleration must overcome substantial inertia. The player has to apply more horizontal force into the ground per stride than a 1.75 m winger to achieve the same change in velocity. That is a basic implication of Newton’s second law: at higher mass, higher F₀ is required to maintain comparable acceleration.

This is why Haaland’s performance signature reads physiologically as a force-shifted F–V profile — high F₀, moderate V₀, peak power produced in the early phase of acceleration rather than at top-end speed. Cross and colleagues, working with elite rugby athletes who share Haaland’s anthropometric category (tall, heavy, ballistic), reported that backs and forwards had distinct mechanical sprint signatures, with the heavier athletes producing greater horizontal force at the cost of velocity [4]. The same physics applies in football: a heavier striker is unlikely to win a 60 m race against a 75 kg winger, but over the 5 m that decides a finishing chance, the force-dominant profile pays.

The plant-leg eccentric loading at the moment of striking the ball is a related but separate F–V manifestation — that is the brake that converts horizontal momentum into a stable platform for the kicking leg. Eccentric F–V capacity is documented as a key contributor to deceleration tasks and is itself a trainable component of the broader profile [2].

Match-context note: Haaland’s high-intensity distance per match in the Premier League sits in a typical striker range (~1.8–2.5 km of >19.8 km/h running per Match data: SofaScore), but the discriminator is the clustering of those efforts around the box rather than across the pitch. The F–V profile rewards short, repeated maximal-effort bursts more than total volume of sprinting — exactly the demand a finishing role places on the body.

What This Means for the Reader

The F–V profile is not just a concept for elite scouting. It is measurable in any athlete with a phone camera, a reasonably calibrated sprint or vertical jump test, and the validated mathematical model from Samozino’s group [2]. The diagnostic question is not how fast can you run? but which side of the F–V curve are you weak on? Two athletes with identical Pmax can have very different optimal training prescriptions: the velocity-deficient athlete benefits from heavy, lower-velocity strength work; the force-deficient athlete benefits from lighter, faster ballistic work [1, 2]. The mismatch between current profile and task-optimal profile — the F–V imbalance — is what to train, not maximal strength in the abstract.

For a developing player, the practical takeaway is to test before training. Three measurements — squat jump, countermovement jump, and a 30 m sprint with split times — are enough to estimate F₀, V₀ and Pmax with the published equations. From there, training can be biased toward whichever variable the athlete is actually missing. That is what specificity means in a strength-and-power program, beyond the slogans.

References

1. Samozino P, Edouard P, Sangnier S, Brughelli M, Gimenez P, Morin JB. (2014). Force-velocity profile: imbalance determination and effect on lower limb ballistic performance. International Journal of Sports Medicine, 35(6): 505–510. doi:10.1055/s-0033-1354382
2. Morin JB, Samozino P. (2016). Interpreting power-force-velocity profiles for individualized and specific training. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 11(2): 267–272. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2015-0638
3. Haugen TA, Tønnessen E, Hisdal J, Seiler S. (2014). The role and development of sprinting speed in soccer. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 9(3): 432–441. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2013-0121
4. Cross MR, Brughelli M, Brown SR, Samozino P, Gill ND, Cronin JB, Morin JB. (2015). Mechanical properties of sprinting in elite rugby union and rugby league. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 10(6): 695–702. doi:10.1123/ijspp.2014-0151
5. Haugen TA, Breitschädel F, Seiler S. (2019). Sprint mechanical variables in elite athletes: Are force-velocity profiles sport specific or individual? PLoS ONE, 14(7): e0215551. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0215551

Match-context data (descriptive only): SofaScore.