This competition is now closed. The winner is Dale O’Donnell, congratulations Dale! And thank you, everyone who participated in this contest. We’ll have more giveaways in the near future.

Would you like to win a copy of FIFA 14 Read on below to find out more!

Professional football has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, with the influx of technology and sports science raising the bar in the game in Great Britain and all over the world. Modern footballers need to be high-performance athletes as well as accomplished with the ball at their feet, with today’s stars spending as much time on fitness and at the gym as they do on the training pitch.

Players are tracked on the distance that they cover over the space of a 90-minute match and consistently run further than the distance covered in most other major sports. The average for a top-class footballer to cover in a game is seven miles, with instances being recorded of players running up to 10 miles.

This reflects favourably against field hockey players who run on average 5.6 miles, tennis players who cover three miles and basketball stars on 2.5 miles. Given that the majority of movement from footballers is sprinting and tracking opponents, it makes the feat all the more impressive. To repeat this week-in, week-out, for club and country, playing up to 60 games in a season under enormous pressure is an amazing testament to the conditioning of the world’s best players.

Ladbrokes offers you the chance to win a free FIFA 14 game

So to celebrate the endurance and fitness of modern-day footballers and the fans’ dedication to the game, Ladbrokes are offering a free Fifa 14 game to one of you lucky readers (they know from experience the amount of stamina necessary to play 12 hours of Fifa without stopping).

Ladbrokes also holds it’s own Endurance Challenge, with onlike poker players winning points and potentially a financial windfall from their dedication to a marathon session with the cards.

For a chance to win your very own copy of FIFA 14, just tweet / retweet this article. We’ll pick a winner at random from one of the RTs by Thursday (29th) and announce the winner on Friday, 30th August 2013.

Please note that this competition is only open to UK residents.

Make sure that you also check out Ladbrokes’ Endurance challenge for August, as your chance to win big at poker.