Size of football pitches in England and European countries

Question

I recently enjoyed watching home fixtures of Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United. Then I thought about the size of football pitch with those played in other European top tier leagues. The ones in English Premier League seem to be small when compared to the stadiums of clubs in Serie A, La-Liga and Ligue 1.

Does the size of the pitch remain the same everywhere? Also would lack of space in metropolitan areas could be a plausible reason why the pitches are small in Premier League or is there any other reason?

Answer 1

The pitch most definitely varies in size, but not terribly much. See this page from the BBC for example. England's rules are very wide - the pitch must be between 90m and 120m long, and between 50m and 100m wide (!!) - that's a big variety, though - but for major (or even mid-level) play, it's pretty close to standardized.

This page lists various Premiere league field sizes; they're in yards, so slightly larger numbers than meters, but same idea. Most are about the same size (the Category 4 UEFA size of 115x74 yards).

Most follow this regulation (see this article on dimensions that mentions the possibility of exceptions). Note though that many of the Premiere League teams have identical dimensions to the requirements - 105mx68m - and those that don't are slightly smaller.

So - most likely, they're not really all that different, in the pitch, any difference you notice is due to how the overall stadium is constructed.

Answer 2

I'm not sure it's that true that EPL grounds are that much smaller than European grounds, at least for the "Big Six" (and Wembley):

Stadium	Club	Length (m)	Width (m)
Anfield	Liverpool	101	68
City of Manchester Stadium	Manchester City	105	68
Emirates Stadium	Arsenal	105	68
Old Trafford	Manchester United	105	68
Stamford Bridge	Chelsea	103	68
Tottenham Hotspur Stadium	Tottenham Hotspur	105	68
Wembley	None / England	105	68

Of these, four (plus Wembley) are the regulation international size of 105×68m and the others aren't that much smaller - even Anfield is 96% of the area of a 105×68m field. Running down other clubs in the Premier League, the only other club I could find with a field smaller than 105×68m was Goodison Park (Everton). It is notable that all three of the "small" stadia (Anfield, Goodison Park, Stamford Bridge) are traditional stadia built well before the era of standardisation.

This is in slight contrast to the other major European clubs, all of whom have 105×68m fields:

Stadium	Club	Length (m)	Width (m)
Allianz Arena	Bayern Munich	105	68
Camp Nou	Barcelona	105	68
Juventus Stadium	Juventus	105	68
Metropolitano Stadium	Athletico Madrid	105	68
Parc des Princes	Paris Saint-Germain	105	68
San Siro	A.C. Milan / Inter Milan	105	68
Santiago Bernabéu Stadium	Real Madrid	105	68

(All numbers taken from the stadium pages on Wikipedia)

Answer 3

For non international matches, the pitch size can vary quiet a bit. The pitch has to be a rectangle whose width can be anywhere from 45 to 90 meters, while the length can be anywhere from 90 to 120 meters. So a football pitch can almost be a square!

However, the international pitch dimensions are much stricter. The width has to be from 64 to 75 meters and length from 100 to 110 meters. So you'll notice much less variety on pitches that host international matches.

So you see pitches with varying legal sized. But specially in the EPL where many of the pitches are very old, or are in populated areas and size is a constraint (tho the variance tends to be in just a few yards/meters). Newer stadiums usually tend to be at or close to international size, so they can host international matches if need be. You can notice the same phenomenon with MLB ballparks where the stadiums come in all sorts of sizes due to space constraints.