Team sport is an important component of a healthy lifestyle, providing opportunities for people to exercise with friends or colleagues, socialise and interact with others in a supportive environment. It has also been shown to improve mental health and promote cognitive efficacy. In addition, team sport can help develop interpersonal skills and the ability to work with others towards a common goal [1].

The growing availability, affordability and accessibility of tracking systems means that practitioners have access to a range of metrics for the description, planning and monitoring of athlete external load in team sports. However, the selection of these metrics requires a critical process to ensure that they are relevant and useful for the context in which they are applied. This narrative review discusses the different tracking systems, their derived metrics and their suitability for use in the context of seven popular team sports.

In addition, it is suggested that there may be a need to move away from the reporting of absolute high-speed running (HSR) values and to consider utilisation of relative metrics such as distance per minute and rolling average durations. The latter provides greater ecological validity than the traditional analysis of discrete 5-15 min epochs and is better suited to the temporal characteristics of team sports.

Additionally, it is important to remember that the objective description of a sport evolves over time. For example, the changing rules of men’s professional Australian football have been associated with changes to flow and speed in matches [55]. Therefore, ongoing monitoring of tracking data allows for the recursive description, planning and monitoring of external load to be updated in line with a sport’s specific characteristics.