How fast do you shoot?

Real numbers, measured with radar

Everyone has a number. Nobody has a measurement.

You hear it every week on the pitch. That was a hundred, easily. The keeper never saw it. And nobody has ever actually measured anything.

This page has measured numbers. We spent a summer clocking shots with a radar — children, an adult, friends who came by — and those are the figures below. No estimates, no lists copied from somewhere else.

What children actually hit

483 shots, every one of them radar-measured, from a group of children kicking in our garden and on the pitch.

That last one belongs to Jens, seven years old. He has 337 of those shots on his own, so it is not a lucky strike on a good day — that is where he lives.

An adult for comparison: 134 measured shots, 64 km/h on average, hardest shot 92 km/h (57 mph). So the gap between a seven-year-old who trains a lot and a grown man going flat out is about twenty kilometres per hour.

And professionals?

A professional footballer averages somewhere around 90 to 120 km/h (56–75 mph), and the hardest strikers reach 120 to 130 km/h. That is exceptional — close to twice the hardest shot of a seven-year-old.

Then there are the numbers you see everywhere: 190 km/h, 211 km/h, "the fastest shot ever recorded". Those are wrong, and you can work out why.

Why 211 km/h is impossible

A ball leaves your foot at roughly 1.3 times the speed of the foot. That follows from the collision itself: a 430-gram ball against a foot that is much heavier, with the ball returning about half the energy. However hard you want it, that ratio is fixed.

The fastest foot speeds measured on professional players are around 25 to 30 metres per second — 90 to 108 km/h. Which gives:

There is your ceiling, and that is why 120 to 130 km/h is a realistic top end. For a ball at 211 km/h the foot would have to arrive at 165 km/h — more than fifty per cent faster than the quickest leg ever recorded. That does not happen.

There is a simpler check, too. The most famous rocket in the history of the game — Roberto Carlos against France — is listed at 138 km/h. The same articles that quote that figure also claim somebody else hit 211. One of those two numbers is wrong, and it is not the famous one.

So where do they come from? Usually an estimate taken off a television picture, or a radar standing at an angle to the ball. A radar only measures speed straight towards itself; point it off-axis and it reads high. A number without a method attached is a story, not a measurement.

Which is exactly why the figures at the top of this page come with a radar, a date and a shot count. A number is worth as much as the way it was measured.

What counts as a good number?

On its own, nothing. A shot speed only means something compared to yourself.

The ball, the surface, the boots and the run-up all matter. A wet ball on wet grass travels slower than a hard ball on artificial turf, and that is not a worse strike. So the only comparison that really works is with your own number from last month — same ball, same spot, same boots.

And here is one almost nobody makes: your weaker foot against your stronger one. Everybody has two and almost everybody trains one. The moment you see the gap as a number, you also see how much is sitting there unclaimed.

How to measure it yourself

A speed radar. A radar gun you place behind the goal. Works well, costs a few hundred euros, and you can rent one for a tournament. See our comparison: football speed radar or your phone.

Your phone. The camera in your phone shoots 240 frames per second. That is enough to follow a ball in flight and work out how fast it is travelling — which is exactly what our app does. Put the phone next to the ball, strike it, and three seconds later the number is on screen.

Shooting harder

Measuring is only half of it. What to do with the number is on how to shoot harder: what actually helps, and what only sounds like it does.

The figures on this page come from 701 shots we measured with a radar between 4 August and 2 September 2026. The professional figures are not ours, and they carry the caveat they deserve.

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