Units of measurement

When did the football pitch, a London bus, Nelsons’ column and the Eiffel tower, become the official standard unit of measurement?

As long as four football pitches

Why do news stories always tell you it is about the length of so many football pitches or so many times the height of the Eiffel tower rather than giving it in some kind of recognised measure like the metre or the yard?    I believe they are still currently used when actually planning and building such things as football stadiums and such.
I personally have no idea how big a football pitch is. I avoided sport at school as often as I could get away with it, being rather puny, and have done so ever since.  My knowledge of football extends to subbuto or those machines where the players are all on metal rods, so to me a football pitch is about six foot long at most.

 

 OK, so if you are really interested you can look up the height or length of the thing used to describe whatever it is in the news and then do the sums but, if they only have such a vague way of describing things, why not say, ‘it is yay big’, stretching out their hands, or it is humongously tall, it would be just about as meaningful.

 

( apologies to the Telegraph Newspapers whos ship picture I have used)