Analysing Victor Osimhen’s incredible leap

When Victor Osimhen leapt to a height of 2.58m to score the first of his two goals for Serie A leaders Napoli against Spezia in February, it served as yet another tick in the box for a striker whose performances this season have caught the attention of some of Europe's biggest clubs.

The 24-year-old's leap beat Cristiano Ronaldo's jump that is listed as the second-highest ever in Serie A (2.56m; against Sampdoria in 2019) and puts him just behind Fikayo Tomori's current Serie A record of 2.61m, which came during AC Milan's 3-0 win against Juventus in May 2021. With eight of his 25 goals (in all competitions) so far this season coming from headers, Osimhen's ability to out-jump his opponents — along with many of his other leading traits — is helping to make him one of the world's most highly rated strikers.

So, how does he do it?

Matt McInnes Watson (or The Plyo Guy by his social media moniker) is a former international high-jumper turned performance coach, and the owner of Plus Plyos. What he observed when watching Osimhen's goal against Spezia, as well as those against Eintracht Frankfurt and Leicester City (in last season's Europa League) is that he doesn't necessarily use incoming speed, as someone like Cristiano Ronaldo would, when winning headers. “What Osimhen is very good at is actually generating a lot of height from almost a standstill,” says Watson.

“So he doesn't have a lot of horizontal momentum that we would normally see to convert into vertical momentum and what you would see as height.”

How does he create that height? Watson points to Osimhen's body type. “He's not very muscularly built in his lower legs and it shows in where his calf is — it's quite short and more up towards the back of his knee. That shows us that he has an extremely long Achilles tendon, and the Achilles tendon is a massive contributor to force, especially when vertically jumping and when you're doing things more on the spot as opposed to running in and winning a header.

“What it shows is that he's off the floor very quickly. He doesn't take a deep drop into that movement to try and jump for as much height as possible. He tends to win the ball in the air, not just because of jump height but because of how fast he is in and out of that take-off. He's not dropping down into more of a squat position. He'll step in and bounce up into the air quickly, which shows a strategy of using more of the tendon instead of calling upon larger muscles, which you might see when you do things like a squatting pattern.”

Being able to get off the floor as fast as possible is one of the key performance indicators for generating good height in a jump, says Watson — something that's apparent in a competitive ball-winning scenario. “If you are slower and take longer to drop into the bottom of the squat pattern and then explode out of that, you won't be able to beat people in the air.

“To maximise jump height, you need to be quick off the ground, and this is called 'vertical velocity' or 'vertical displacement velocity'. That is the time taken from a small squat position that loads up all the muscles and tendons to the maximum height of your jump. If that time is very short, you will always beat the person next to you who takes a lot longer to do that. Vertical speed and velocity is the number one variable that we look at in jump technique and jump performance.”

Osimhen rises high (again) to put Napoli 1-0 up at home to Frankfurt in the Champions League (Photo: Tiziana FABI / AFP)

Archit Navandar is a senior football biomechanics specialist at Aspire Academy in Qatar. He points to two things that Osimhen does that help him to achieve such an effective jump. The first is that he pushes his arms back before he jumps up. “He increases the elastic energy accumulated during what we call the braking phase — the phase when he goes down. And the amount of energy you can accumulate in the braking phase is the amount of energy you can give out in the pushing phase (when you are coming back up).”

The second is that he often flexes his knees in the air — something he didn't do for his goal against Frankfurt — for reasons Navandar explains below. “Normally, when a person jumps you will see that their knees are straight, but if you keep your knees flexed a little bit, you're getting more hang time,” says Navandar. “If you're in the air for longer, that gives you a little bit more decision-making time. I've seen this with (Lionel) Messi, with Ronaldo and now with Osimhen.

“He uses this hang time when he's in a duel situation. So for the goal against Eintracht Frankfurt, he used his arms and there was the initial knee flexion, but there is no hang time, becuase he's already getting the power and there's no opponent or duel he needs to win. He just needs to get the ball to his head on time.

“There was a study that came out last year using volleyball spikers (the attacking player who tries to hit the ball to end a play and earn a point for their team). They gave them two instances, asking: 'What is the difference when you spike without flexing your knees in the air, and when you do? And the athletes got about 60 or 70 milliseconds more air time (when flexing their knees).

“The average person would need about 250 milliseconds to react to a stimulus. And then you add in Hick's law (a psychological principle), which says that the more options/choices you have, the more reaction time that is needed (to make the best decision). So, if you get a greater hang time, theoretically, you're increasing the decision-making time and you can not only win the header but also decide where you want to put the ball.”

Aside from these two specific observations, there are fundamental principles of achieving a good jump height that Osimhen also adheres to. One of those is physical characteristics: having good height, good power, strong muscles in the lower body and a strong core.

Napoli's talisman doing what he does best during his side's Serie A match away at Sampdoria (Photo: ANDREAS SOLARO/AFP via Getty Images)

It's also about coordination, which Navandar explains as “moving the entire body in the direction that you want it to move, but in a sequential manner. Normally in biomechanics, the ideal situation would be to go from the proximal joint to a distal joint (the near joint to further away). So when you look at a jump (in football), you initiate it at the legs, and then it goes right up to the header — the last distal point of contact.

“The coordination is very important because many times what you see with 'normal' athletes is that some people are very good with their feet, but when you ask them to jump using their arms as well, they're not so good. But almost all football players are very good at using their arms to jump higher.”

Studies done in the U.S. with young volleyball and basketball athletes use electromyography (EMG) — which measures muscle reaction or electrical activity in response to a nerve's stimulation of the muscle — to show how athletes who can generate good height on a jump display a sequential muscle activation pattern. “You see that they are able to jump much higher because they're able to activate certain muscles first and then others,” says Navandar. “So they're able to execute the perfect movement, basically going from down to up sequentially.”

Being able to create a good amount of elastic energy is also important. “When you pull a slingshot back, that's elastic energy. You want the muscles to work in the same way,” explains Navandar, who echoes Watson in saying that speed is of the essence. “Biomechanics literature says that the lower you go to a certain degree, and the faster you go, the higher you jump. In football, what you will see is that the depth to which you go down is not as important as the speed with which you go down.”

Reactive strength is the final thing that Navandar points to, which refers to the amount of contact time that an athlete has with the ground. The lesser the contact time, the greater height you jump. “A long jumper or high jumper would have very high reactive strength because they're able to stay in the air for a long time with a very short contact time. You're jumping off the toes because if you put your full foot down, it's very difficult to get the same amount of height.”

While many speed and power athletes will use various methods to work on their jumping ability (including weight training and more specific plyometric work) as a means of building power and explosivity, Navandar says that the focus for footballers is not necessarily on achieving more height, but on being first to the ball.

“The biggest challenge (in football) is the question of duels,” says Navandar. “That's something that we train a lot with the academy players. And something that I've seen even when I was back in Spain (in a previous biomechanics role with Real Madrid).

“You always try to win the headers — you try to coach this as soon as possible. You don't train to jump high. What you train for is to win a duel. So you're given the problem: I want to win the ball in this situation when the ball comes in. And you've got to find the solution. You don't say: 'This is the first step, use your arms' etc. It's an inherent learning process.”

Osimhen's own process has taken him to a place where he's able to impress with his aerial ability as much as his intelligent movement, technical ability and work off the ball. And it has ensured that he's on the 'most-wanted lists' of many top clubs this summer.