First published in January 2022, this page now brings together six videos from official club, league, broadcaster and manufacturer channels. They sit alongside ten moments grounds staff, referees and volunteers recognise from real work.
Nothing below is a rule. Pitch dimensions and markings come from the Laws of the Game and from your competition's handbook. What follows is the practical folklore that sits alongside them.
The unavailable compilation that originally sat on this page is still not used or replaced by a mirror. The six players below are separate official publications. They remain on YouTube and load only after a reader clicks.
Six real videos from official publishers
A goalkeeper follows the rugby line instead
Bradford City's Harry Lewis handles the ball after reading a rugby marking as the edge of his penalty area. Sky's replay makes the competing lines, and the reason for the mistake, very clear.
Official video published by Sky Sports Football. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you ask to load the player.
Chelsea's squiggly line-marking challenge
The grounds-team segment begins at 9:08. Two presenters try to cut and mark straight training-pitch lines, immediately produce something they describe as ‘big and squiggly’, and then have to explain the result.
Official video published by Chelsea Football Club. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you ask to load the player.
The penalty spot disappears in the snow
Snow has erased the penalty spot, so Bundesliga referee Robert Kampka counts out the distance and makes a replacement before play can continue.
Official video published by Bundesliga. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you ask to load the player.
Magic spray goes the wrong way at Hartlepool
When the referee goes down injured, Scott Harrison reaches for the magic spray and gives the official the same improvised treatment normally reserved for a free-kick wall.
Official video published by Hartlepool United. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you ask to load the player.
Altrincham lets GPS mark the pitch
Alty TV follows an autonomous GPS-linked marker adding the football lines after the club's pitch and drainage refurbishment. It is the precise, robotic opposite of Chelsea's squiggle.
Official video published by Alty TV. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you ask to load the player.
A robot writes THANK YOU NHS across Old Trafford
Rigby Taylor's own video shows a TinyLineMarker transforming the centre circle at Manchester United's Old Trafford into a huge pitch-wide tribute.
Official video published by Rigby Taylor. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you ask to load the player.
Ten moments every grounds team recognises
The halfway line that goes on a journey
It starts square to the touchline and finishes about a metre and a half upfield, which nobody notices until the first goal kick and then nobody can un-notice for the rest of the season.
What it teaches String lines before paint. Peg both ends of every straight line, pull the string tight, and walk the machine along it rather than towards a distant point you are eyeballing. Marking towards a fixed post at eye level is the single biggest improvement most volunteer teams can make.
The double image
Someone remarks the pitch without following last week's line closely enough, and by November every straight on the pitch has a faint ghost running alongside it like a badly printed newspaper.
What it teaches Overmark along the existing line, not beside it, and slow down at the point where you pick the old line back up. If the ghost has already appeared, it will normally grow out rather than wash out, so plan the correction around a cut rather than around a match.
The centre circle that is not a circle
Marked freehand, by a confident person, at speed. It ends up as a shape somewhere between an egg and a county boundary, and it is visible from the clubhouse.
What it teaches The centre circle has a 9.15 m radius for 11-a-side. Put a peg on the centre mark, run a 9.15 m cord from it, and walk the machine around keeping the cord just taut. It takes four minutes and it is the marking everyone looks at.
The penalty spot that moved
Measured from the front edge of the goal line one week and the back edge the next, so the spot creeps forwards a few centimetres per repaint until somebody with a tape measure has a very public afternoon.
What it teaches Agree which edge of every line you measure from and write it on the setup sheet. The penalty mark is 11 m from the midpoint between the goalposts, measured to the centre of the mark. Consistency between repaints matters more than any single measurement.
Painting yourself into the corner arc
The classic. You finish the arc facing the corner flag with wet paint on three sides of you and a set of footprints already committed to the history of the pitch.
What it teaches Mark corner arcs last, working outwards, and plan your exit before you start the curve. The same applies to the goal areas: decide the walking route around the whole penalty box before the first line goes down.
The wind, the drift and the referee's shirt
A gust catches the spray at exactly the moment the referee walks past to inspect the goalmouth. The line survives. The shirt does not.
What it teaches Check the wind before you open anything. Mark with the wind across you rather than behind you, drop the nozzle height, and if it is genuinely gusty, move to a wheel-to-wheel transfer marker instead of an aerosol. Overspray on kit is the most common complaint volunteer teams get.
The lines that vanished before kick-off
Marked beautifully on Saturday evening. Rained all night. By half past ten on Sunday the pitch looks like it has never been marked in its life.
What it teaches Paint applied to saturated grass, or applied with rain arriving inside the product's stated drying window, will not hold. Read the drying and rain-resistance figures on the container you actually have, and if the window does not fit, mark earlier or accept a fainter line and remark on the morning.
Two pitches, one set of lines
A 9v9 pitch marked on top of an existing 11-a-side layout in a different colour, on a foggy morning, with two matches kicking off at once. Nobody knows which touchline is theirs.
What it teaches If you have to overlay formats, use a clearly different colour, mark the smaller pitch second, and brief both referees before kick-off. Where you can, offset the smaller pitch so the two sets of touchlines are never within a metre of each other.
The vanishing spray moment
The one that started this page in the first place: a referee marking a free-kick wall, getting the foam on their own boots, then discovering the wall has quietly moved two metres while they were looking down.
What it teaches Nothing for grounds staff to fix here. It is just proof that everybody who has ever held a can of line marking spray, including the officials, ends up on the wrong end of one eventually.
Running dry at the far corner
Three sides of a full-size pitch marked to a professional standard, and then the machine coughs, spits and dies about twenty metres from the last corner flag.
What it teaches This is an arithmetic problem, not a bad-luck problem. Work out the line length for your pitch, multiply by line width to get the painted area, then divide by the coverage figure on your product for the number of coats you are applying. Add a wastage allowance for priming, spillage and the overmarking you always end up doing. Our pitch marking calculator does that arithmetic for you.
The four things that prevent most of them
The pattern behind nine of those ten is the same: a measurement that was never written down, or a quantity that was never worked out. Both are fixable before you open anything.
- Write the pitch dimensions down once and keep the sheet with the machine. Length, width, penalty area, goal area, centre circle radius and penalty mark distance. Every repaint then starts from the same numbers.
- Work out how much paint the job needs before you buy it, using the coverage figure on the product you are actually going to use rather than a rule of thumb from a different product.
- Peg and string every straight line. Freehand is the origin story of most of the moments above.
- Check the forecast against the drying window on the container, not against what the paint did last spring.
Product choice matters more than most volunteer teams expect, because coverage per litre, drying time and how a line behaves on wet grass all vary considerably between products. Whatever you use, take the coverage and drying figures from that container and its safety data sheet rather than from a general guide. If you are comparing options, suppliers who specialise in football pitch line marking products publish those figures alongside each product, which makes the arithmetic a good deal easier.
None of this stops the funny moments happening. It just means that when they do, the pitch is still playable and the referee's shirt is still the right colour.