Something doesn’t seem quite right.
It feels like there is a lack of space and players are on top of each other, especially in wide areas.
As your eyes scan the pitch, you can’t help but notice how the edge of the penalty area and the touchline seem to be unusually close. That’s because they are unusually close.
The Copa América will be played on the smallest playing field allowed for an international match: 100 meters long and 64 meters wide (109 by 70 yards).
Or, to put it another way, a prestigious tournament involving some of the world’s top footballing nations is being held on pitches that are similar to the dimensions that under-13 academy players routinely use in England to help them transition from 9-a-side to 11-a-side football for the first time – widening the wing-lines and shortening their length to reduce the physical demands. The total amount of space lost is roughly equivalent to the size of a penalty area.
This is all very well for children, but it is not normal for top-level international footballers.
“I would like to draw attention to the size of the fields,” Brazil coach Dorival Junior said before Monday night’s goalless draw against Costa Rica. “It will mean that the games will be more closely contested. A team that defends its own area will be able to go on the counterattack and reach the opponent’s field much more quickly. It’s worth thinking about that.
“We talked a lot about it in training: how it will be easier to get forward quickly, but also how it will be harder to find a way to get past a (deep) defence. The distance between where we regain possession and the opponent’s goal is much shorter than in games in our country.”
Danilo, Brazil’s captain, sounded like a man who had just had the rug (or maybe that should be the grass) pulled out from under his feet after inspecting the playing surface at SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles.
“I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the pitch, which will allow us to play a technical match,” said the Juventus full-back. “But with these dimensions, expect fights, wars and many physical challenges.”
Danilo (left) said the throws would make games very physical (Mark Leech/Offside/Offside via /Keynote USA/Getty Images)
It wasn’t the size of the field that prevented Brazil from beating Costa Rica, but there is no doubt that it was a factor in the match (something Costa Rican coach Gustavo Alfaro later acknowledged) and that it will have a significant impact on this tournament. Even those who emerged victorious in their first match accepted that reality.
“The measures are extremely tight,” Colombia coach Néstor Lorenzo said after their 2-1 victory over Paraguay on Monday. “One hundred (meters) times 63 (sic), right? Furthermore, you see throw-ins reaching the six-yard box regularly, even I, without any strength, could get the ball there. Almost all players are used to playing on a much wider field. Wider and longer, too. And that helps the team that presses, almost always.”
If you’re wondering why this happened, the answer is quite simple.
CONMEBOL, the governing body of South American soccer and the organizer of the tournament, wanted all the fields to be the same size, which makes perfect sense. A team doesn’t gain an advantage simply by playing in a particular stadium. But that becomes a bit of a problem when NFL stadiums are used to host soccer games (as is the case for 11 of the 14 Copa America venues) — particularly NFL stadiums where there is limited space to increase the playing area (for context, each NFL field is 110 meters long but only 49 meters wide).
The lack of wiggle room in some places (corner kicks, pictured below from the Peru-Chile match, can be an interesting experience for anyone trying to take advantage of a swinger) has been most obvious at SoFi Stadium in California, MetLife Stadium in New Jersey and AT&T Stadium in Dallas. But everyone else has had to abide by the limitations, even if it meant shortening and narrowing a perfectly good-sized field — Children’s Mercy Park in Kansas, where the lines used for MLS games were clearly visible during Tuesday’s match between Peru and Canada, is a good example.
In short, this is a one-size-fits-all approach to Copa América 2024, and that approach is small.
“All the fields are natural grass (we converted synthetic surfaces to natural grass in six stadiums) and each field measures 100m x 64m,” a CONMEBOL spokesperson told The Athletic.
The story will be different when the men’s World Cup comes to the United States, Mexico and Canada in two years. All venues will have to meet the strict rules of FIFA, world football’s governing body, for pitch size: a playing surface of 105m x 68m (the same as the Premier League requires) and has a significant exit zone. In some stadiums, that means seating will need to be removed and major construction work carried out. In fact, work has already begun on MetLife Stadium, at a cost of $16 million (£12.7 million at current exchange rates).
“Early on in this process, we realized that MetLife Stadium, like many other NFL stadiums, was built a little bit more oval, and the football field, or pitch, needs to be a little bit more rectangular,” Lauren Nathan-LaRusso, co-chair of the host city and general counsel for the New York and New Jersey host committee, explained a fortnight ago. “So in the corners of our stadium, we needed to widen them. That work started this year and we’ve done one side of the stadium and will do the other next year.”
Problem solved for the World Cup, then. But what happens now?
In short, if you’ll pardon the pun, the Copa América coaches and players need to get their act together and adapt.
The dimensions of the penalty area cannot change. In fact, it does not take a mathematician to realise that the area where, proportionally, the most space has been lost is on the wings (it is not clear whether that observation will make Vinicius Junior feel better or worse after his disappointing performance against Costa Rica).
“If you look at (Costa Rica’s) marking, it was very fast and that’s normal because it’s a smaller pitch, vertically and horizontally, and that affects the defence and makes it harder to attack,” Dorival Junior said after Brazil’s opening goal. “(The size of the pitch) makes it easier to defend and harder to attack, so double-marking is easier: when Vini had the ball, he had two markers on him and a third one coming close. Raphinha suffered the same.”
The general consensus is that defensive teams or, as Lorenzo pointed out, those that like to press, will benefit more from a smaller playing field. By the same token, it seems pretty obvious that a lack of width is not conducive to playing expansive football and all that that entails.
In Alex Bellos’ excellent book Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, the late, great Socrates raised concerns more than 20 years ago about the way physical attributes dominated the modern game and robbed it of much of its beauty. “The spaces between players are relatively smaller. This causes much more physical contact and makes it much more difficult for the player to create plays… as a consequence, football has become uglier,” he said.
Socrates, an erudite man who thought deeply about the game, had a solution: keep the field size and reduce teams to nine players per team. Whatever one thinks of the former Brazil international’s proposal, it is hard to see how an eleven-a-side match on an ever-shrinking playing field increases the entertainment value.
Some of the Copa America players seem reluctant to flaunt it. “I didn’t really think about it until now. It didn’t seem too tight,” said Gio Reyna, the U.S. national team midfielder, when asked about it by The Athletic.
Reyna’s teammate Weston McKennie agreed: “Obviously, there may be people who care more, who pay more attention, but it’s not something I worry about.”
The danger of something like this, of course, is that the small size of the field starts to be blamed for everything that goes wrong and the players are given a break for a bad game that they don’t deserve. That said, there were some curious moments in the first half of the Brazil-Costa Rica game.
Just under seven minutes into the game, Raphinha took a corner that wasn’t so much exaggerated as it was hit hard out of bounds: the ball landed well beyond the six-yard area on the other side of the goal (videos 1 and 2 below ). At that point, he had already attempted a swing toward Rodrygo that was so wide that it looked like the equivalent of using a driver on a short par three (videos 3 and 4). The ball bounced once and flew out the other side for a throw-in.
Meanwhile, Costa Rica’s Juan Pablo Vargas attempted a routine free kick to the right that caused winger Haxzel Quirós to turn and run backwards before the assistant referee had a chance to raise his flag for Brazil to take the shot. Then came the goal kick that Costa Rican goalkeeper Patrick Sequeira took directly at the feet of the… Brazil coach (what beautiful control by the 62-year-old coach, by the way).
One gets the feeling that some coaches have been blindsided by all this and had little prior knowledge. Alfaro, Costa Rica’s experienced and talkative coach, told a story after the game against Brazil about how he had asked the team bus driver to delay leaving the stadium after his pregame press conference on Sunday because he had just read that the field was too small.
“I wanted to take a look at the grass to see its condition and dimensions and I noticed that there was little space between the box and the wings,” Alfaro said. “That is very important if you try to spread your game, like Brazil does. So, defensively for a line of five (like Costa Rica did in defense against Brazil), those spaces are shorter.”
The examples in the following video, all from the first half of the Brazil-Costa Rica match, illustrate Alfaro’s point.
Of course, there was a way around all this: play the games in Major League Soccer stadiums, where lack of space would never have been a problem (some of the MLS fields are enormous: 120 m long and 70 m wide).
However, that would have significantly restricted capacity and, God forbid, reduced revenue. In addition, the Copa America serves as a dress rehearsal for World Cup venues to resolve any problems off the field.
“It’s a complicated issue,” added Brazilian striker Rodrygo. “We’ve definitely noticed it and we’re trying to get used to it as quickly as possible in training. In the friendly against the United States (before the Copa America) there wasn’t much space. I like to find space between the lines, but there wasn’t space; the opposing players were always close. It’s difficult, but we’re getting used to it. We’ll find the right way to approach it.”
Additional contributors: Jack Lang, Melanie Anzidei, Pablo Maurer, Felipe Cárdenas
(Top photo: Mark Leech/Offside/Offside via /Keynote USA/Getty Images. Graphic: John Bradford)
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