Can we please stop using football pitches as a measurement? Using fucking hectares (or acres) or at least square kilometres when you talk about land sizes like every normal person.
The bad thing about football pitches is, that they dont have a standard size.
Football pitches (european football ones) do have a standard size, as defined by the Laws of the Game, 105×68m
Interesting, i looked it up and at least for the German “Bundesliga” (national league) it does not have a standard size. Also the sizes vary for German and international matches.
At least that’s what their official website says.
Why the fuck do we have so many football pitches? /j
they don’t anymore.
didn’t you read? they are losing 600 per day
That’s horrifying. If it continues, there will be nowhere to play football.
Can we not use football fields and such as measurements like filthy Americans? Especially in a freaking academic context.
Europe is losing basically 7.84x10^6 hamburgers worth of cropland.
Europe loses about 1,500 sq km (580 sq miles) a year to construction. About 9,000 sq km of land – an area the size of Cyprus – was turned green to grey between 2018 and 2023, according to the data. That is the equivalent of almost 30 sq km a week, or 600 football pitches a day.
A great example of why football pitches are used. People cannot visualize an area of 1500 km², because nobody has ever seen such an area while being aware/told that that is the size of said area.
Most people in Europe knows roughly how large a football pitch is, and might even be able to visualize an area covered by 600 of those.
Although I guess “4km²/day” isn’t that bad to visualize either.
1500 km² is around the size of Åland
I have never in my life seen 600 football pitches. And I find it hard to visualize what that would look like. Surely if we’re going to draw a comparison there is something more sensible to use?
The point is that ‘it is a lot of the thing that you are familiar with’ to drive fhe point home, not to be a precise measurement.
It isn’t like knowing the literal area mean anything without knowing it’s proportion of fhe total. Even a percentage may not convey the real impact.
I’m saying alternate measurements are an attempt at conveying scale.
That’s why in Germany, we also use Saarland (2570km²) as a reference size, but that is a bit too much here
/s (the suggestion, we actually do use Saarland all the time)
People cannot visualize an area of 1500 km²
That’s where hectares are useful and a sensible, well known metric.
How do you guys reach a point where you’re arguing for less effective science communication? They’re summing up values as universally recognized objects. Wow! That sounds like the perfect way to communicate with people.
It’s such a no brainer. The “anything but metric” meme turned people into dorks.
Only downside is, that most people usually dont know how mich a hectare is. It usually only gets used in the context of farming (at least I havent heard it outside that context)
that’s an acre.
how much land one is able to plow with 1 donkey (or horse, forget which. probably the horse as a donkey can be stubborn from what I hear)The only thing you have to remember is, that 4 acres are one hectare.
If I remember acre comes from how much land one can now using a scythe in the morning (in German acre is “Morge” which is almost the same as the German word for morning which is “Morgen”)
a football pitch in this case is both metric and anglais.
as a yard is roughly equal to a meter.
100x50 meters. 100x50 yards for a football ⚽/🏈 pitch
There are unfortunately many studies that point all in a similar direction, and it is not a European but a global problem.
In 2024, for example, a map from the Save Soil movement – backed by the UNEP, UNCCD, UNFAO, WFP, and IUCN amongst others – illustrates that 95% of the Earth’s soil is on course to be degraded by 2050.
[Globally] every second, an equivalent of four football fields of healthy soil becomes degraded – adding up to a total of 100 million hectares every year. Non-degraded healthy soil is a direct necessity for 95% of the food production for more than 8 billion people.
For nations across the globe, this degradation is also causing a rapid increase in climate shocks such as droughts, threatening hundreds of millions of lives, crippling livelihoods, and forcing millions of people into migration.
How much is that in square-fathoms?
Approximately 25000 Renault 10
3 barnacles
No no no, I need that in imperial washing machines.
