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Comment by mrisoli | Hacker News Reader

And maybe not so relevant these days because most pitches are standard size, but years ago football pitches could vary in size, 90-120m in length, and 45-90m in width, maybe in the past even more, I remember some quoting some pitches as long as 130m+

Teams who were on the boundaries of these often took advantage of it, my home team played in a larger than average pitch and you would clearly see teams that went in full pressure to lose a lot of gas by the second half, the best coaches knew how to make this count. On the other side of the spectrum, teams with shorter fields favoured playing long balls straight from goal kicks to the strikers.

Tbf I miss a little bit the days where these small inconsistencies would affect the game and require a little bit more studying on the coaches part.

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The numbers you quoted are still the standard although international pitches are constrained to 64-75m wide, 100-110m long. That probably means top teams are likely to use the international standard or at least have the option to mark the pitch thusly when things like the World Cup or Euros need stadiums.

In Brazil they would vary wildly so that's where my nostalgia comes from, after the WC in 2014 pretty much all of them were standardised to 105x68

Rather sadly the Premier League now has a mandated standard pitch size, and there are only a few outliers remaining (basically older stadia where the architecture precludes conformance). So any new stadium has to conform to the standard dimensions, e.g. the new White Hart Lane (whereas the old White Hart Lane had a smallish pitch, which was often touted as conveying some advantage to Tottenham, especially most recently when playing an energetic pressing style under Pochettino)

I remember Nottingham Forest (my team) had the widest pitch, and Arsenal (famous for playing dull boring football) had the narrowest.

However, the really interesting thing was I remember hearing an interview with an Arsenal player (possibly Lee Dixon) saying he knew just how to hit a soft pass into a shallow groove that ran along the side of the pitch - it looked like the ball was going to go out of play but it would catch this groove and move up the pitch instead.

Same, my old home team used to have a pitch on the smaller end of the spectrum and you could really see the impact it had on teams who were used to having space to build up plays.

The home fans were also much more in their faces (though it never helped seemingly when we fell off a cliff at the 80 minute mark to throw it all away...)

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