Dr. Robert Webb has refereed nearly 1000 games

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Expert Referee Dr. Robert Webb on The Field of Play

Law 1: The Field of Play

In Britain, it’s a ‘Pitch’.  Why is it called a ‘Pitch’?  One author¹ reckons it’s because in England, one used to pound stakes into the ground for goals, like ‘pitching a tent’, and apparently the word ‘Pitch’ became common usage.  I think it’s just one of those ‘cute’ British words with origins nobody seems to be sure of.  Like why are soccer cleats boots. There are others like chuffed or jammy.²

So let’s have a wee shufti at The Field.  In soccer, it’s the second-most important thing.  (What’s first?  The ball.  But that’s Law 2. We’ll get to that in a future article.)  You need a smooth, continuous grass-like surface to play soccer.  Soccer fields are long, and there’s a lot of running involved. If you watch English Premiership Soccer on TV, you see these perfectly manicured soccer fields, verdantly green, and mowed opposite ways every ten yards. That’s easy in Britain, it rains all the time. The Pitch is built for one thing: soccer, and they wouldn’t dream of sharing a stadium with a baseball team. You see soccer fields all over San Diego. But very few look like those in Britain, because coming up with the water to keep the grass alive is an issue, but so is available space.  Fields are designed for ‘mixed use’, so that other sports like football and baseball can use them too. 

The problem is, just like golf courses and trying to grow rice, we live in a desert, and growing grass in a desert doesn’t make sense. So, OK, you wouldn’t get very far trying to play soccer, or football, or even baseball for that matter, if the field were covered with Laurel Sumac, Blue Sage and Bush Monkeyflower, so you need grass. In most cases, in youth soccer at least, the field is grass, and perhaps not well watered, but still playable.  But in some cases, like the ARCO center, it is purpose built for soccer, and the fields are verdant green grass. In other cases, and probably the most practical, the field is synthetic turf, like Balboa Stadium, and is a hybrid soccer field football field. That represents a good ‘mixed use’, and it sure doesn’t take any water to maintain it.  That’s probably the future of athletic fields in Southern California, as more and more schools are moving to synthetic turf fields that require little maintenance, and no water.  As a referee, I really like running on turf. You don’t have to worry about stepping in a gopher hole, which could ruin your whole day. A not so good ‘mixed use’ is like Canyonside Park next to the Penasquitos Reserve, where every field just has to have a baseball diamond, otherwise it’s not ‘mixed use’. Right. A soccer field can really be used for anything, but the dirt on a baseball diamond can be used for only one thing: running between bases during a baseball game. Even the gophers won’t use it.

OK, it’s Saturday morning in America, and we arrive at the soccer field. Ever wonder why the field looks the way it does, with the goals at the end, the corner flags, the white lines that are sometimes really straight, and all the funny looking circles and markings?

There are a couple of things that the LOTG say you must have on a regulation soccer field. LOTG says 50X100 yards, as is often the case in San Diego, if there isn’t enough room to mark off 50X100, it must at least be longer than it is wide.  Euclid referred to it as a ‘rhombus’ and if the rhombus has right angles in it, it’s commonly referred to as being rectangular. No square soccer fields. It must have goals. It must have minimum markings, like the ‘touch line’, or sidelines, and the ‘goal line’, or end lines. Those lines must all be the same width and not more than 5 inches.  It also must have a few designated areas where players and the ball congregate at key moments at the same time during play, like the center arc, which is where kickoffs take place, corner arcs, where the ball is placed for a corner kick, the goal area for a goal kick, the penalty area for defining the area where the goalkeeper can handle the ball, and particular types of fouls, and the penalty arc for keeping opponents at the required 10 yards on penalty kicks.

The Arcs. Why an ‘arc’? On any free kick, your opponent is required to be at least ten yards from the ball in all directions.  Notice I said ‘at least’. When someone says ten yards, and I as the referee walk it off, and it looks like it’s twelve, well hey Bubba, it doesn’t say ‘exactly’ ten yards, it says ‘at least’ ten yards (Law 13). ‘Arc’, because ten yards in all directions means you draw an imaginary circle around the ball that is ‘at least’ ten yards, and any good geometer could draw a complete circle, and an arc is part of a circle.  Why is the penalty arc only, like, half an arc? That’s because you’re not supposed to draw the rest of the arc into the penalty area.  And anyway, you don’t need to, because on a penalty kick, nobody can be in the penalty area except the goalkeeper, the kicker and the referee. I know, details, details. The spot where the penalty kick is taken from is twelve yards from the goal line, but the penalty area line is only 18 yards from the goal line, thus 6 yards from the penalty mark, so if you do the math, there is ‘at least’ 4 yards outside the penalty area that represents where players must be to be ‘at least’ ten yards away from the penalty mark when a penalty kick is taken.

The Flags.  According to the LOTG, corner flags are ‘compulsory’, which means no flags, no play. These flags must be at least 5 feet high. Why? So that if someone runs into a flag or knocks it over, they cannot be impaled on the flag or otherwise injured. Flags at the Halfway Line are optional, but again, must be at least 5 feet in height to be legal.  It is considered dangetous to play with shorter flags.

The Touchline.  You often hear the phrase ‘touchline’ or ‘out at touch’. That refers to the ball going out of bounds on the sideline or ‘touchline’. The touchlines or sidelines must be parallel to one another, just another boring detail of the geometry of being rectangular. Touch, because the restart is a throw-in awarded to the opponent of the team who ‘touched’ it last before it went out of bounds at the touchline.

The Goal Line.  There are three reasons the goal line is important. If the ball crosses the goal line not between the goal posts last touched by a defender, the attacking team is awarded a Corner kick. The ball is played back into the field of play by setting the ball down inside the corner arc, and kicking it back into play. If it crosses the goal line not between the goal posts last touched by an attacker, the defending team is awarded a goal kick. The ball is played back into the field of play by placing the ball on the six yard line or anywhere inside the goal area, and kicking it back into the field of play. If the ball crosses the goal line between the goal posts, it’s a goal. In all three situations of crossing the goal line, the ball is then technically out of play, and the re-start is either a corner kick, a goal kick, or a kickoff, respectively.

Oh, and by the way, when a goal kick is being taken, technically no defender may remain inside the penalty area, and the ball must leave the penalty area before it can be played by any player. Obviously, the player who took the goal kick can’t touch the ball again until it is touched by another player. And also, one little detail about defending side free kicks from ‘the box’ is that any free kick that originates in the ‘box’, or penalty area, must leave the penalty area before it can be played, not just a goal kick. If you are the attacking side, you may take an indirect free kick and shoot straight at the goal as the ball does not need to leave the penalty box first and may be struck by any player 

Why is the goal area referred to as ‘the box’?  It looks like a box.  Go figure.

Halfway Line? Again, self-explanatory. It is half way down the field from the goal line. It is where kickoffs are taken from (the Center Mark inside the Center Circle), and it is also a demarcation line for offside (one of the four ways to not be offside is to be in your own half, behind the Halfway Line).

The goals are 8 feet high by 8 yards wide. And most importantly, they must be anchored to the ground in some manner.  This is important, and not really to be joked about, because some years ago, a goal post fell over and killed a ten-year old boy on a soccer field.³ Ever since then, this is the rule: the goals must be anchored to the ground in some manner.

So now you know why a soccer field looks as it does.  All those little markings have a purpose in defining where certain plays take place according to the rules, the LOTG. 

And next time you run into your local groundskeeper, ask him to water the grass.  Please?

1. http://www.helium.com/items/295743-why-a-soccer-field-is-called-a-pitch

2. http://www.effingpot.com/slang.shtml

3. http://charlottesville.injuryboard.com/defective-and-dangerous-products/lawsuit-filed-by-family-of-boy-killed-by-unsecured-soccer-goal.aspx?googleid=233438.