Football speed radar
Buy one, rent one, or use the phone in your pocket
You are looking for a speed radar. You may already own one.
A speed radar for football measures how fast the ball travels when you strike it, in kilometres or miles per hour. There are three ways to get a number, and they differ mostly in price and in what you can do with them afterwards.
1. Buying a radar gun
The usual device is a sports radar you stand about a metre behind the goal, a metre off the ground. It works on doppler — the same principle as a speed camera — and reads well past a hundred kilometres per hour.
What you get: a number on a large display, instantly, readable by everyone standing around. That is excellent at a tournament or a club day.
What it costs: a few hundred euros. And you need a goal to put it behind.
2. Renting one
For a club day, a fundraiser or a party, renting is the sensible option. Hire companies bring the whole set-up: goal, net and radar, for an afternoon.
That is what you want when a queue of children each get three shots. It is not what you want when you are trying to find out whether you have improved since spring.
3. The camera in your phone
This is the newer route, and the reason this page exists.
A modern phone records 240 frames per second. A ball leaving at 70 km/h travels about eight centimetres between two of those frames. And because a football has a fixed circumference, the app knows how big the ball is — so it can work backwards from the frames to the speed. No radar needed, just arithmetic.
Put the phone next to the ball, strike it, and three seconds later the number is on screen.
Which one do you want?
| Radar gun | Phone | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost | a few hundred euros, or hire by the day | €5 a year |
| You need | a goal and a net | a ball and a phone |
| Readable by a crowd | yes, big display | no, your own screen |
| Keeps your shots | no | yes, per player |
| Shows your technique | no | yes, frames before impact |
| Good at a tournament | yes | less so |
| Good for weekly training | no | yes |
In short: if you want to give a hundred children a number in one afternoon, hire a radar. If you want to know whether your strike is harder this winter than it was last summer, you need something that comes along every week and remembers your shots.
What a radar gun will not do
A number on its own does not make you quicker. You struck it at 64. Now what?
That is the part we added: after every shot you see twelve frames of the moment just before contact. Where your standing foot was. How your instep came through. Change one thing, strike again, and watch the number move with it. A radar gun cannot do that, however accurately it measures.
Free for 10 days, then €5 a year — less than one ball.
Wondering what a normal number looks like? On how fast do you shoot there are 483 radar-measured shots from children, an adult at 92 km/h, and the reason the famous 211 km/h record cannot be real.
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