St James’ Park, on a Saturday evening in late October, has a way of making you feel the speed before you see it. The stands are close. The pitch is wide. When Anthony Gordon hits the touchline at full tilt, the sound arrives a half-second late, and by then he is already past you.
Newcastle United finished the 2025/26 Premier League season as the only club with three players in the top ten fastest speeds recorded across the campaign. Anthony Elanga clocked 36.35 km/h against Chelsea in December. Gordon hit 36.26 km/h at Brighton in October. Dan Burn, the centre-back, registered 36.13 km/h against Leeds in August, a number that raises its own questions but belongs, for now, to the same conversation. T1 - Premier League official
Three from one club. No other side managed it.
The numbers, on their own, are a curiosity. Speed lists are the kind of data that fills a slow news cycle and a social media graphic. But the pattern at Newcastle is not accidental, and the people who built this squad will tell you so, if you ask them directly and let them finish the answer.
Eddie Howe has spoken, more than once, about the profile he wants in wide players. Pace is not the only attribute, he has said, but it is the one you cannot coach. You can improve a player’s decision-making, their positioning, their final ball. You cannot, past a certain age, add three kilometres per hour. So you recruit it.
Elanga arrived from Nottingham Forest in the summer of 2024, a player whose pace was never in question but whose end product had been inconsistent. At Newcastle, under Howe and his coaching staff, the raw material has been shaped without being sanded down. Elanga’s runs are more selective now. He still covers ground at a rate that frightens full-backs, but the timing has changed. He picks his moments the way a sprinter picks a lane.
Gordon’s development has followed a different path. He was already at the club, already quick, already a player the St James’ Park crowd had adopted. What has changed in the past eighteen months is the consistency of his output at speed. The 36.26 km/h recorded at Brighton was not an outlier; it was the visible peak of a season in which Gordon has been, by most measures, the most improved wide player in the league. His goal return has doubled. His chance creation has risen. The speed was always there. The application has caught up.
Howe’s system asks a lot of his wide men. The full-backs push high. The midfield two, or three depending on the match, are expected to cover the channels when the wingers press. It is a structure that demands physical output, and the data bears that out. Newcastle’s wide players rank among the highest in the league for high-intensity sprints per 90 minutes, a metric the club’s performance staff track with the same attention they give to expected goals.
The recruitment strategy has been deliberate. Since the Saudi-backed takeover in 2021, Newcastle have not simply bought pace; they have bought pace with a purpose. Elanga, Gordon, and the wider squad profile suggest a club that has identified speed as a competitive advantage and built around it. The coaching staff, led by Howe and supported by a performance department that has grown significantly in size and resource, have then worked to ensure that speed is deployed in the right areas of the pitch, at the right moments.
There is a tactical dimension that the raw speed numbers do not capture. Newcastle’s counter-attacks in the 2025/26 season have been among the most direct in the league, not in the long-ball sense, but in the speed of transition. When the ball is won, the first pass is almost always forward, and the first movement is almost always from the wide players. Elanga and Gordon are the outlets. The system is designed to give them space to run into, and the data suggests it works.
Burn’s inclusion on the list is the outlier that proves the rule. A centre-back at 36.13 km/h is not a recruitment strategy; it is an anomaly, or perhaps a testament to the physical demands Howe places on every player regardless of position. Burn has never been described as quick. That he appears on the same list as Elanga and Gordon says something about the intensity of Newcastle’s pressing, and about the lengths a centre-back must go to when the team in front of him is built to attack at speed.
The Premier League has always had fast players. What Newcastle have done, in the 2025/26 season, is make speed a collective identity rather than an individual trait. Three players in the top ten. No other club can match it.
Howe, in his press conferences, will not frame it that way. He will talk about the group, about the culture, about the work done on the training ground at Darsley Park. He is not wrong. But the numbers are the numbers, and they tell a story that is hard to argue with.
St James’ Park, on a Saturday evening, still makes you feel the speed before you see it. The difference now is that it happens three times as often.
