I like how the unit of size was football pitch. I guess around the world it's assumed that the reader has intimate familiarity with lining up sporting fields but can't handle things like a metric system.
> I guess around the world it's assumed that the reader has intimate familiarity with lining up sporting fields
Because it's probably true for the great majority of the population.
[0] - I've been to a real football pitch maybe 3 - 4 times in my life (for non-sports related events), I don't usually watch football and I don't plan on starting to do it. I'd much prefer for sizes to be measured in multiples of Space Shuttle wingspan, but I guess it won't fly with 99.9% of people ;).
I know how much that would cost me in server farm, apartment, and retail space. My exposure to a magnitude (or a collection of) meters far exceeds my exposure to a large area reserved for multiple say, soccer fields, or any intuition on really how large they are.
To be honest, whenever I hear something like "17 football fields" I go look up the distance of a football field to try to understand what the heck they are talking about. They might as well have phrased it as the distance a snail travels in the time it takes for a tea-candle to burn.
I use metric and imperial units every day. I intuitively and immediately know what 330 meters is in almost any context.