_______________________ Received for publication July 8, 2014 13 Monten. J. Sports Sci. Med. 3 (2014) 2: 13–18 Original scientific paper UDC 796.012:796.332 Comparison of the Anaerobic Power of Brazilian Professional Football Players Grouped by Tactical Position Renan Renato Cruz dos Santos University of Brasilia, Faculty of Health Sciences, Brasília, Brazil Caio Victor de Sousa, Rafael Reis Olher, Ivo Vieira de Sousa Neto, and Lilian Alves Pereira Catholic University of Brasília, Graduate Programme of Physical Education, Taguatinga, Brazil Marcelo Magalhães Sales Catholic University of Brasília, Graduate Programme of Physical Education, Taguatinga, Brazil UDF Centro Universitário, Health School, Brasília, Brazil A B S T R A C T Football is characterized as a predominately aerobic modality, however, during a match; the most important actions performed by the players are in short duration and high intensity. In addition, this sport presents to have some particularities, such as, highlights differences of each tactical position. Thus, this study aimed to compare the anaerobic power of professional football players grouped by different tactical positions. Thirty professional football players separated in three groups, goalkeep- ers+fullbacks, sideways+DMF (defensive middlefields) and OMF (offensive middlefields)+forwards, performed two anaerobic po- wer tests, Running anaerobic sprint test and Sargent jump test Goalkeepers+fullbacks showed higher values of body mass index and absolute anaerobic power (w), using Sargent jump test than the others, but when analyzed the RAST results, this same group presented lower values (p<0.05) of relative AP (w·kg-1). OMF+forwards showed to have the best Pmed and Pmax values (p<0.05), when compared with defensive players. These results suggest the use of running anaerobic sprint test and sargent jump test toge- ther when is proposed to measure the anaerobic power of football players, and also a anthropometric evaluation, so the training can be more specific e efficient to each tactical position and athlete. Key words: Anaerobic power, Sprint test, Football, Tactical position. Introduction Football is one of the most popular sports practiced in the world and moves in their matches, televised or not, millions of fans who enrich this sport. This way, with the growing of the communication vehicles and the high investment from the so- ccer clubs for the formation and preparation of athletes, some researchers passed to pursue better understanding about this modality with the goal to improve performance of those indivi- duals. This sport is characterized as a predominantly aerobic modality being 80-90% of the energy used coming from the oxidative system (Santos & Soares, 2001). However, during an official football match, the athletes also realize another physical actions of short duration and high intensity (sprints, jumps, spins), being predominant, in this cases, the anaerobic-glycoly- tic system. Souza (1999) examined that, in a football match, a player performs one sprint every 90 seconds. Besides, some studies (Di Salvo, Tschan, Calderon Montero, Bachl and Pigo- zzi, 2007; Di Salvo, Gregson, Atkinson, Tordoff and Drust, 2009) pointed that, is executed 17 sprints of 20 meters per match by each player. This way, the decisive moments of a football match seem to depend these actions, independent of the player’s position in the tactical formation, so, is justified the need to monitor the anaerobic power for a better performance in these athletes (Asano, Oliveira and Bartolomeu, 2009). Anaerobic Power (AP) is defined by Franchini (2002) as the maximal liberated energy for time unit by the anaerobic- glycolytic system, being evaluated using several methods: Win- gate (Franchini, 2002), Continous Jump (Bosco, 1999), Squat and Countermovement Jump Test (Markovic, Dizdar, Jukic and Cardinale, 2004), Sargent Jump Test (SJT) (Salles, Mello, Vas- concellos, Júnior and Dantas, 2010), Running-bases Aerobic Sprint Test (RAST) (Zacharogiannis, Paradisis and Tziortis, 2004) and yo-yo test (Bangsbo, Laia and Krustrup, 2008). However, according to Kiss (2003), the greater the similarity of the mechanical test mode in question, the greater the practical usefulness of the training. Nevertheless, the RAST stands out, by maybe being the test that is more related to the actions of football. In addition, football presents to be a complex sport with so- me particularities, among which, highlights differences of each tactical position, such as, traveled distance per match (Santos et al., 2001; Zagatto, Miyagi, Sakugawa and Papoti, 2013), ana- erobic threshold (Santos et al., 2001; Zagatto et al., 2013) VO 2 max (Santos et al., 1999), body composition (dos Santos, 1999), and especially the quantity of actions in high intensity that each player executes. On the other hand, there’s a lack of studies that investigate the AP of professional football players grouped by tactical posi- tion, in a way that, studies such as Santos, Coledam and dos Santos. (2009), Dal Pupo, Almeida, Detanico, Silva, Guglielmo and Santos (2010), Asano et al. (2009) and, Asano, Bartholo- meu-Neto, Ribeiro, Barbosa and Sousa (2009), made use of the sample distribution and different methodologies of analysis from those employed in the present study, using overall average as in indicative of data central tendency, not showing the