Why a football pitch is a bad unit, and what to use instead
The most popular unit in size journalism is a rectangle whose dimensions are allowed to vary by twenty per cent. That is not a small problem when the whole point of a unit is that the listener already knows it.
The pitch is a range, not a size
The laws of the game allow a pitch to be between 90 m and 120 m long and between 45 m and 90 m wide. For international matches the range narrows, and 105 m by 68 m is the length and width fixed for those. That 105 m is the figure used in this catalogue, and it is the only reason the object works as a reference at all.
What this means in practice is that a domestic pitch can legally be a third shorter than the one the phrase conjures. Two grounds in the same league can differ by ten metres. A unit with that much slack is a unit only by courtesy.
Why it gets used anyway
Because it is the largest object most readers have physically stood on. That is a real advantage and it should not be dismissed. A shipping container is defined to the centimetre and almost nobody has walked the length of one. A pitch is loose and universally experienced.
So the honest position is not to ban the unit but to state which pitch. Saying the length of an international football pitch, 105 m, costs four extra words and converts a vague gesture into a figure.
The comparison that makes the point: Titanic at 269.1 m against a 105 m pitch gives 2.56. Use the shortest legal pitch instead and the same ship becomes three pitches long. One object, two answers, both defensible from the laws of the game.
Units that are actually fixed
A tennis court, 23.77 m baseline to baseline. The length never changes. Only the width differs between singles and doubles, and the length is what gets quoted. Diplodocus at 25 m against a tennis court gives 1.05, which is a startlingly good fit and a properly defined comparison.
A cricket pitch, 20.12 m wicket to wicket. Twenty-two yards, a length inherited from the surveying chain, and unchanged for centuries. Note that the pitch is the strip in the middle: the rest of a cricket ground has no fixed size whatsoever, so cricket has both the best and the worst unit in the same sport. The Colosseum at 48.5 m against the pitch is 2.41.
A shipping container, 6.058 m. One TEU, and the entire world's cargo statistics are counted in multiples of it.
A sheet of A4, 29.7 cm. Defined by an international standard and present on every desk.
Choose a unit near the thing you are measuring
This is the rule that matters more than standardisation, and it is the one most often broken. A unit works when the count is small. Saying a thing is two and a half tennis courts long is legible. Saying it is a hundred and eighty tennis courts long is not: past about five, the count stops carrying meaning, and you have converted one incomprehensible number into another.
So for a 25 m dinosaur, a tennis court is the right unit. For a 269 m ship, a pitch is the right unit if you state which pitch. For an 828 m tower, neither works, and the Eiffel Tower at 330 m is a better reference because the ratio comes out at 2.51 rather than in the tens.
Invented pitches, oddly, are better defined
There is a small irony here. A Quidditch pitch is stated in the source material at five hundred feet long and a hundred and eighty wide, which converts to 152.4 m. That is a single figure with no legal range around it, which makes it a more precisely defined object than the real sport it borrows from.
Against a tennis court at 23.77 m the ratio is 6.41. Both figures are exact. Whether an exact figure for a thing that does not exist is more or less useful than an approximate figure for a thing that does is a question this guide will leave open.
A short checklist
Before using an everyday object as a unit, three questions.
- Is there a single number, or a range? If a range, name the figure you are using.
- Will the count stay under about five? If not, find a bigger unit.
- Has the reader stood next to one? If not, the precision buys nothing.
A football pitch fails the first and passes the third, which is exactly why it is both the most used and the least reliable unit in circulation. Naming the figure fixes it, and naming the figure is the habit worth building.