What would you change about it? The first official guidelines from the British FA allowed for the pitch to be up to 200 meters long and 90 meters wide, significantly larger than modern day pitches. That change was made over 120 years ago! It is time we look at the pitch so let’s do that here.
via Wikimedia Commons
With the focus of making the game more enjoyable for fans, what would you change about the pitch?
For my money, the best thing to do to make the game as exciting as possible is to shorten it. This is not in response to a problem but rather an observation of ‘how could the game be better’. The thought is simple, the shorter the pitch the quicker from defense to attack, the more goals will be scored, the more exiting the game becomes!
Width, how does the pitch’s width effect the game? The wider the field the more space to play and the easier it is to keep possession and find passes. It would follow that making the pitch narrower would lead to more turnovers, more broken up play, less long periods of possession, the more back and forth the game becomes.
On paper I think these arguments are clear, but what exactly would the effects of these changes be? Do we have any examples of pitches that are smaller than most to compare numbers from a standard pitch? Luckily, there are a few of them around the world, in our next blog we will look at those, you might be surprised by what we found.
