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Comment by mcalus3 | Hacker News Reader

It was sarcasm, no one uses anything like that outside of the US. Using football fields as a measure of distance is as "stupid american" meme around the world.

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Most of the rest of the world assumes a soccer pitch when an American says a football field. They are basically the same length, so what exactly is your problem with using them as a marker for distance?

We Brits have our own markers, e.g. the area of Wales or the volume of a double decker bus. They don't translate that easily either.

Interestingly the area of a football pitch has a pretty huge degree of tolerance - between 45-90m wide and 90-120m long - and iirc while they can be nearly square, they aren't allowed to be exactly square (i.e. you can't have a 90x90m pitch, but 90x91m is ok ... if a little unusual).

At some point I believe the home team would adjust the width/length according to opponents' preferred tactics, but idk if that happens anymore.

There is no regulation football pitch in the world that is 45m wide. Where did you get this?

UEFA regulations are tightly controlled. The pitch must be 100-105m long and 64-68m wide.

FIFA have a wider tolerance (100-110m long) but that's probably because FIFA tournaments don't have home and away teams, whereas UEFA do.

There probably aren't many regulation football pitches that narrow ... but it is absolutely permitted. You can get this information plenty of places but since you raised FIFA, it's in their PDF containing the Laws Of The Game (determined by IFAB) https://digitalhub.fifa.com/m/1cf301829f1cf996/original/ifab... - see pages 36 and page 37

Note that they do impose some additional restrictions for internationals. And yes UEFA also have restrictions on the dimensions of the pitches that can be used for their competitions (Europa League, Champions League, Conference League) much like they have restrictions on stadia at various levels in those competitions. But according to the laws of the game, those are the dimensions. It wasn't always this way - Rangers narrowed their pitch by "a couple of yards" to mess with Dynamo Kiev in the European Cup back in the late 80s (it worked, they beat them and advanced).

We both know that a 45x120m pitch would look certainly look weird, but if we are talking about what is allowed in football the standard are the IFAB laws, not what UEFA stipulate for their elite competitions. If you're watching the English Premiership then you won't see such pitches - these clubs will believe they can compete in such competitions and will want to do host home games at their own stadia. If you're watching or playing in 2nd tier or lower (a number of clubs and pitches vastly outnumbering those at the very top) in any country you very well might encounter them.

Good point about IFAB, I have only been referring to orgs like UEFA and the FA.

In England all organised football, even amateur, is regulated by the FA, so we can say there is no regulation pitch here in England that is less than 60m wide

But you're right, elsewhere it could be all sorts. Pitches can be hemmed in by rocks, trees, water, dwellings, whatever so people will just play on what they have.

I believe the FA actually use the looser dimensions (meaning 45 metre width is ok), but you're right few clubs at the upper end of the pyramid will really push the boundaries so to speak. Might make for some fun cup encounters though :)

> if we are talking about what is allowed in football the standard are the IFAB laws, not what UEFA stipulate for their elite competitions.

To be pedantic though, EUFA defines grassroots football as anything that is non-professional and non-elite, and since 2017 IFAB says that national FAs are free to make their own rules on pitch dimensions for grassroots football. So there is no contradiction - IFAB, EUFA and your FA are all in agreement :)

Who is my FA?

How would I know? But it doesn't matter: If your local youth club decides to host an officially sanctioned international tournament, they might go ask IFAB about what size to make the pitches. IFAB is going to tell them that if they meet the national FA guidelines, then they meet the IFAB guidelines. (Look at page 25 of the IFAB law book)

Usually only few pitches needs to have UEFA/FIFA standard.

Handegg pitches have a fixed size of 109.75x48.8. Football pitches vary in size a lot so it doesn't make sense to use them as a reference size.

UEFA regulations say a pitch has to be 100-105m long, the FA and FIFA say similar. I wouldn't call that a lot of variance.

If someone wants to communicate precision, they should probably use SI units instead of sports pitches. If not, football field will do just fine.

> football field will do just fine

One just needs to check the size of random field first.

In Italy we definitely often use "campo da calcio" as a quick measurement unit for areas. I'm guessing that's due to the fact that for most people using squared meters is really limited to measuring housing areas and other few use cases, so reverting to something that everybody knows well (a football field) is much more effective. For distances, everybody is very comfortable using all powers of 10 of the meter for all kind of purposes so there's no need to use references to real world measurements.

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