Player Who Has Covered the Most Ground on Average Per Premier League Match This Season Is Revealed

If a fellow football fan was to ask you to guess which Premier League footballer had covered the most distance on average, per league game this season, you'd probably plump for a couple of obvious names.

Chelsea's N'Golo Kante, Burnley's George Boyd and Liverpool's Jordan Henderson are usually all up there, so one of those should be crowned the outright winner, correct?

Well, you'd be wrong on all three counts. The player to have covered the most ground, in kilometres, throughout the 2016/17 campaign is none other than Tottenham playmaker Christian Eriksen according to official Premier League data recorded by Opta (via Dream Team).

Yep, we're just as shocked as you are. The Spurs and Denmark maestro, who incidentally has covered the most greatest total distance with 418.88km from Tottenham's 37 matches, has covered an average of 11.97km per league encounter - a league high that puts the likes of Kante and Henderson in the shade.

Liverpool's club captain, who has been out of action since Feburary with a niggling foot injury, isn't far behind Eriksen in the standings, however, with the midfielder averaging around 11.92km per game.

Kante's Chelsea team-mate Marcos Alonso is, slightly surprisingly, third in the table with an average of 11.65km, and is chased - not literally - while Kante and Liverpool's James Milner find themselves making up the rest of the top five.

Strangely enough, Burnley attacker Boyd and Everton's Idrissa Gana Gueye - two stars who you may expect to make the top 10 rankings - are nowhere to be seen, and the duo may want to take a bit of a long hard look at themselves in the mirror when you see the likes of Swansea's Gylfi Sigurdsson and Liverpool's Roberto Firmino completing more average kilometres per match than them,

The data, which took into account English top flight players who had featured more than 10 times for their clubs this term, certainly has a trend that leans towards midfielders and full-backs covering the most ground which, given their current roles in starting lineups up and down the country, should be an expected trend.

We imagine there will be some hotly contested arguments about this data, but facts don't lie. Who would have envisioned Eriksen leading the way though, regardless of Mauricio Pochettino's desire to see his teams press across the park?

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