If you are an avid soccer fan, and the parent of a child who plays the sport, you might have found yourself thinking, on more than one occasion, ‘I wonder if the pitches are the same size as each other’.
And it isn’t a stupid thing to ask. In fact, this is something that puzzles a lot of people. Even those who have played on both high school and professional soccer fields.
The simple answer is no, well at least not in all cases. There are rules which dictate the exact measurements that a professional soccer field should be in order for it to be used professionally.
But there are no rules which dictate how big a high school soccer field should be, which is why some schools will opt for a smaller pitch depending on how much ground they have.
That being said, there are some guidelines for pitch size that high schools should follow.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at the guidelines and rules for both high school and professional soccer fields to determine the differences in their dimensions.
High School Soccer Field
First, let’s take a look at the dimensions of your average high school soccer field.
While high school soccer is a completely different level to professional soccer, guidelines for the size of the pitch are still given by the NFHS.
Also known as the National Federation of High School Associations which is the governing body for High School soccer and other sports in the USA.
Part of their job is to supply the guidelines for pitch size, but they also complete a variety of other jobs too.
The guidelines are extremely detailed and specific, so let’s take a look at what they are:
- Field length: 100-120 yards
- Field width: 55-80 yards
- Center spot: 9 inches
- Center circle: 10 yard radius
- Goal area width: 20 yards
- Goal area depth: 6 yards
- Penalty area width: 44 yards
- Penalty area depth: 18 yards
- Goal width: 8 yards
- Goal-line to penalty spot: 12 yards
Please note that all of these measurements are taken from the outside of the white lines, not the inside.
This might seem like an insignificant detail but it makes a huge difference when you are measuring the field out.
If you took the top parameter and measured from the inside of the line, you will find that your marked field is actually bigger than you thought which could cause problems when it comes to playing matches on the field.
As you can see there is some leniency in quite a few of the measurements of a high school soccer field, and this is mainly because the NFHS recognizes that not all high schools will have access to the space required for a full-size (professional) soccer field.
So now that we know the measurements for a high school soccer field, let’s take a look at the guidelines set for professional soccer fields.
Professional Soccer Field
Next, let’s take a look at the dimensions of your average professional soccer field.
There is a lot of money in professional soccer, so as you would expect the guidelines for this type of soccer are much more strict.
Just as the NFHS dictates the rules for high school soccer, another board dictates the rules for professional soccer, and that is the IFAB, or International Football Association Board.
This board not only dictates the rules for soccer in the USA but for soccer all over the world. It is a common misconception that FIFA dictates the rules of soccer, but FIFA, or the Federation Internationale de Football Association, is actually part of the International Football Association Board.
So while FIFA is perhaps the better-known name, it is the IFAB that dictates the rules of soccer worldwide. This includes the guidelines for the size of a professional soccer field.
These are the required dimensions:
- Field length: 100-130 yards
- Field width: 50-100 yards
- Center spot: 9 inches
- Center circle: 10 yard radius
- Goal area width: 20 yards
- Goal area depth: 6 yards
- Penalty area width: 44 yards
- Penalty area depth: 18 yards
- Goal width: 8 yards
- Goal-line to penalty spot: 12 yards
Again, the measurements that have been dictated in this list are measured from the outside of the white line, rather than the inside so you should bear this in mind when marking out a field.
As you will probably have already noticed, there are a lot of similarities in the measurements of both the high school and professional soccer field guidelines, but we’ll take a deeper look at that a bit later on.
Before we move onto that, we need to establish the difference between professional and international soccer.
The majority of the countries in the world have professional soccer teams, all of which have slightly different rules on soccer field measurements which is why the rules of soccer in the USA cannot be directly applied internationally.
At the international level, the measurements for both length and width of the field are a lot tighter, so it is important to remember that the rules of American soccer cannot be applied internationally.
Let’s Compare the Two
So now that we have taken a look at the required measurements for both high school and professional soccer fields, let’s begin to compare the measurements for both types of fields.
Simply by looking at the measurements earlier, you will have noticed some of the similarities between both requirements, but there are also some notable differences, so let’s take a look at what they are.
First, let’s take a look at the differences as these are in the minority. But before we go any further, please note that we are simply comparing the guidelines.
Different soccer fields will sit at different points in the range, so we can only compare the guidelines rather than exact measurements.
The only differences between the two lists of dimensions that we have looked at are the dimensions for the length and width of the field.
As you will have noticed earlier, the dimension range for a professional soccer field is larger than the dimension range for a high school soccer field.
However, if you take a closer look, you will notice that this range seems on the higher end of the scale because the guidelines for professional soccer fields are wider than the guidelines for high school soccer fields.
You might find this confusing as we told you earlier that the guidelines for professional soccer fields were stricter.
But despite the guidelines being wider, they are actually much stricter.
In high school soccer, there will be more leniency if the soccer field does not meet the requirements, but in professional soccer, there won’t be.
But other than the measurements for length and width of the pitch, the measurements for all of the other guidelines are identical for both high school and professional soccer fields.
In fact, these measurements tend to be pretty universal.
The professional soccer field guidelines that we looked at above are set by the IFAB which dictates the rules for soccer worldwide, so these guidelines are universal.
What you may notice from country to country is differences in the guidelines for high school soccer as these are not universal.
So now that we’ve established that there is a difference between the dimensions of high school and professional soccer fields, let’s take a look at some of the reasons why these differences exist.
Why is there a Difference?
As we have established, even though quite a few of the dimensions for high school and professional soccer fields are similar, there is one difference, and that is the size.
The guidelines for high school soccer fields are tighter than the guidelines for professional soccer fields, and because of this they often measure much smaller in size.
However, there is an overlap between the guidelines of the professional soccer and high school soccer field, so there is a chance that the soccer field which you watch your child play on might measure the same size as a professional field.
But even though there is a chance, it is actually unlikely that your child will play on a field that is the same size as a professional field. The reason behind this we touched on earlier, but let’s take a closer look.
A lot of high schools are relatively old and when the high schools were built, soccer was not as popular as it is today.
Due to this, a lot of high schools did not factor a soccer field into the floorplan of the school, and so they now do not have the space to add a full-size pitch to their land.
Similarly, a lot of newer high schools that are built simply do not have space for a professional size field.
Most high schools are being built in areas that are already developed, and so schools are having to opt for a field which they can fit rather than the field that they want.
Another reason why high schools do not have full-size soccer pitches is because they instead have a football field. T
he guidelines for an American football pitch are smaller than the guidelines for a soccer field, and because football is the more popular sport, a lot of schools choose a field to match these guidelines rather than the soccer guidelines.
So as you can see from these reasons, the chances of your child playing soccer on a field that is the same size as a professional soccer field are very slim when they are in high school.
Summary
In short, the differences between high school and professional soccer field guidelines are very small.
Despite this, the majority of high school soccer fields will measure smaller than the professional soccer fields you observe on the television.
