How Hard Is Soccer Fitness, Really?

Vox did the thing where a producer borrows some cleats and tries to keep up with professional athletes, and honestly? It works better than it has any right to.

The video — Are soccer players the most fit athletes on the planet? — sends producer Nate Krieger to a Brooklyn FC practice to run drills with the team's head of performance, Michael Higbee, and forward Stefan Stojanovic. The panting is real. The humbling is real. And somewhere between Krieger's audible gasping and Higbee calmly explaining GPS load metrics, the video actually lands on something genuinely interesting about how soccer fitness works and why it's so difficult to explain to people who didn't grow up watching it.

That last part matters more than it sounds. Soccer is mid-breakthrough in the American sports media ecosystem. The USMNT finally feels like a thing worth caring about. MLS is throwing serious money at serious players. Soccer fitness content is everywhere on TikTok — whether it's Erling Haaland's gym routine or some creator running a Premier League-inspired conditioning test in their backyard. There is a real, growing appetite from a younger American audience for exactly the kind of explainer Vox made here. So it's worth asking what the video actually gets right, where it leaves things open, and why the question in its title is harder to settle than the runtime suggests.

The actual argument

The strongest version of what Vox is arguing goes like this: soccer is uniquely demanding because it doesn't let you specialize. It's not an endurance sport the way cycling is, where your engine is essentially the whole game. It's not a power sport the way American football is, where explosive bursts are built into the structure of play. Soccer asks for both — plus agility, plus decision-making under exhaustion — and it asks for them in an order that nobody can predict.

Higbee puts it cleanly: "It's not an endurance sport in the same way that we think of, let's say, cross-country skiing or cycling or rowing, whereby the outcome of those sports is 90% determined by endurance. The endurance is, if you like, it's just the base layer."

That framing is the video's most useful contribution. Endurance as infrastructure, not outcome. You build it so you can access the other stuff — the sprint, the duel, the decision — when the game demands it. Strip the endurance away and you can't get to the explosive moments that actually determine results.

Stojanovic adds something Higbee can't, which is what this actually feels like from inside a career: "Throughout the season, I don't think there's ever been a moment in my five years of playing professionally where I've been 100%." That's not a complaint — it's a structural reality. Soccer seasons don't have a recovery cadence built in the way NFL schedules do with their bye weeks and short rosters. You're managing accumulated load constantly, which is part of why the GPS monitoring Higbee uses exists: not just to push players harder, but to know when to pull back.

The format question

Here's where I want to push on the video a little, because I think it's worth being honest about what the producer-tries-the-drill format can and can't show you.

Krieger getting winded on a forward's movement drill is viscerally useful. You feel the lateral cuts, the ball control under fatigue, the recovery run back to halfway. It's the right instinct for a 10-minute explainer — show don't tell, put a body in the space and let the audience feel the scale of what professionals do for 90 minutes.

But there's a ceiling on what that format can teach. Krieger's exhaustion after one drill in borrowed cleats tells you the drill is hard. It doesn't tell you much about what years of sport-specific adaptation actually build — the way a professional's body has learned to recover between high-intensity bursts, or how movement patterns become automatic enough that you're not burning cognitive fuel on footwork when you need it for decisions. That adaptation is the actual story, and it lives in Higbee's GPS data and in Stojanovic's career trajectory, not in a journalist's labored breathing.

The video knows this, to its credit. The GPS section is where it gets genuinely interesting — Higbee explaining how the load spikes in the data tell him who's coasting and who's overextending, and how he uses that to build individual plans rather than generic team programs. "My job is about trying to push super strengths," he says. "The players have elements that they're incredibly good at, and that's why they're professional athletes." The sports science infrastructure that modern clubs run is a real story, and Vox gives it real airtime.

The World Cup layer

The video folds in World Cup context, and this is where things get genuinely complicated in a way the format can only gesture at.

The logistical demands of a tournament — knockout rounds that can stretch to 120 minutes, three or four days between matches, no recovery runway — compress everything. As Higbee explains, a player could be competing in Miami one week and Mexico City days later. Mexico City sits at roughly 7,350 feet above sea level, per Wonder & Sundry's altitude guide for CDMX visitors — and that gap between sea level and altitude is a real physiological variable that performance teams have to account for, not a footnote.

The psychological dimension Higbee raises — almost apologetically, since it's outside his formal domain — might be the most underexplored piece. "I'm not an expert from the neck up," he says. "But the World Cup has to be the most psychologically demanding of tournaments that these people will play in." He's right, and the fact that he points toward the gap rather than filling it is intellectually honest. The fitness infrastructure can optimize a player's body. What it can't do is simulate the specific weight of a World Cup knockout match, the way exhaustion and pressure interact at that scale.

What it actually leaves open

The title — Are soccer players the most fit athletes on the planet? — is doing a job the video wisely declines to finish. Higbee says soccer is "definitely on the list of hardest sports." Stojanovic says it "if not the most chaotic sport, it is definitely one of the most chaotic sports." Nobody in the video actually claims the crown, and the honest answer is that "most fit" is too blunt an instrument for what's actually interesting here.

A Tour de France cyclist has a VO2 max that would make most soccer players look sedentary. An NFL defensive lineman is moving more absolute load on any given play. A gymnast has body control that a midfielder will never approach. What makes soccer distinctive isn't that its athletes are generically fitter — it's that the game demands so many different physiological qualities simultaneously and unpredictably. That's not the same thing as "most fit," and the video is more interesting when it stops reaching for that comparison and just describes what it actually found.

Higbee's coaching philosophy is the cleanest takeaway from the whole thing: "Having fitness won't necessarily win you the game, but it will certainly lose it." That's a useful frame beyond soccer — fitness as elimination criterion rather than competitive edge. You don't win because you're fitter. You lose access to the game when you're not.

That's the thing the next soccer fitness TikTok won't tell you, and the thing that actually makes the Vox video worth watching.

---

— Jai Trivedi