I do not fully agree.
If you can combine skill with speed, then you make a perfect player ala Christiano Ronaldo!
Speed alone is useless in pretty much every sport, excluding sprinting of course and specific positions in American Football and Rugby!
But skill alone is useless in most sports. In today's sports, if you are not willing to be athletic and work hard, talent alone won't lead you anywhere!
in soccer what matters is very short "sprints", or more precisely turns
what matters is changing direction very quickly
mantaining the speed or trying to run at top speed is useless
also when you play football you are closer to the ground , you don't run standing up like you would do in a sprint
cristiano is a total athlete, i believe that he could have been a sprinter
but he's not the "fastest" player out there, yet he's the best (with messi and a few others)
also cristiano has great stamina ect, something that is very important in soccer (it used to be the most important thing, back then the "cooper test" was used, and only that test, no test for speed)
what ronaldo also has is an ability to play 60 games per season whithout getting injuried, it's a huge aspect of what a player has to do in order to be one of the bests
so when they measure the top speed of players they don't measure the quality of the player ofcourse, but they don't even measure the athletic abilities of the player, because ronaldo is the most athletic player yet there are some bums ahead of him in those speed rankings
here is an interesting video on ronaldo and they compare speed in straight line and zig-zag speed:
[video=youtube_share;v9-hC0XwubI]http://youtu.be/v9-hC0XwubI[/video]
here is the full video of all the test on ronaldo:
http://youtu.be/BeNLd68TTsM