Pitch Perfect

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Why we love it

When you overlay high-resolution aerial imagery from the pitches of 92 professional football clubs in England and Wales, you get a mesmerising spirographic pattern. This map shows us the fascinating juxtaposition of playing surface dimensions and ranks them in a league table of pitch (field) size along with the stadium plans. We love how the super large-scale blurs the line between traditional map and infographic.

Why it works

The cartography grabs your attention with its innovation—part of the secret behind any successful map. Because this map deals with something familiar, it can be daring in how the subject is represented. It speaks to the interested, inquisitive lover of football. This map works because it demonstrates mapped data as something artistic, graphic and fascinating in its own right—even outside its usual spatial context. 

Important steps

  • Create the pitch lines

    Generate a set of pitch markings as a line feature class. The largest pitch (Nottingham Forest’s) was the template. Build external pitch lines using Create features on the map tools to draw a rectangle. Add internal lines using specific lengths of line or other dimensions.
    How to create points on a map
    Work with ArcGIS Pro

  • Group and align the lines

    Group the set of lines, copy and position in place over a high-resolution imagery basemap. Grouped lines can be rotated according to the correct angle of alignment for each pitch. The key is editing requires moving internal lines rather than just scaling all the lines.

  • Convert lines to graphics

    All 92 grouped sets of line work in the pitch marking feature class were selected and converted to graphics. They were then aligned horizontally and vertically (using the Align tools on the Draw toolbar). Presto, they all sit atop one another, rotated around the centre spot.
    Convert features into graphics

  • Scale pitch chart

    For the right side of the map, it was simply a case of adding a map frame to the layout for each pitch in order of area size, all at scales of 1:5,000. Small multiples and additional stadium detail give a sense of each pitch in isolation and ranked from largest to smallest.

  • Complete

    The final poster was completed with various text components to provide details of pitch dimensions and stadium miscellany, an explanatory paragraph, a pitch marking diagram and a scatter graph showing the relationship between pitch length and width.
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Requirements

  • Data and software

    The pitch data was manually digitised from large scale digital globe imagery. The stadium data was derived from Ordnance Survey Open Map - Local product. Software used: ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Online
    Download OS OpenMap

  • Analysis

    This map is all about data creation, combination and editing.

  • Time

    The original pitch took a couple of hours to build. Each subsequent pitch took about 10 minutes to copy, paste, rotate, edit the dimensions and ensure internal consistency. Creating the Spirograph was three clicks. Designing and building the final layout took about a week.
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Tips and tricks

  • Build the data yourself

    Football pitch lines didn’t exist but if you want the map badly enough, you build the data.
    Read about this mapping experiment

  • Experiment for fascinating results

    Experimentation with mapped data can reveal some surprising and fascinating results. Who knew football pitches would overlay in such a beautiful way?

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Resources

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Cartoon headshot of Ken Field, map author

Map Author

Ken Field

Professional carto-nerd, amateur drummer and snowboarder. High quality, innovative, and sometimes a little crazy cartography in modern maps.

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