Man, I spent an entire weekend chasing shadows trying to figure this out. My nephew, big guy now, just made the jump to U13 football. That’s proper 11-a-side stuff. You figure 11v11, you get the huge goals, right? The ones they use on TV? The classic 24 feet by 8 feet beasts.
Wrong. Absolutely wrong. I went to the first practice and the goals looked… small. Not 5v5 small, but definitely not full-sized. I asked the coach, this young guy who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else, and he just shrugged and said, “They’re regulation youth 11s, mate.”
That pissed me off. “Regulation” according to who? I hate vague answers, especially when it involves shelling out cash for specific gear or training my kid/nephew based on the wrong scale. So I decided I was going to crack this code myself. I documented every single step, because if I was confused, everyone else must be too.
The Great Goal Dimension Hunt: Driving Around Parks
My first move wasn’t hitting the internet. That’s for desk jockeys. I grabbed my beat-up 50-foot tape measure and drove straight to the three biggest parks our league uses. I wanted real-world data.
First stop: St. Anthony’s Field. They had two sets of goals set up. The adult ones were definitely 24×8. The goals on the adjacent pitch, where the U13s were practicing, were smaller. I physically measured the width first. It came out to 21 feet. Height? Exactly 7 feet. Okay, so 21x7ft. That’s size one. I wrote that down.
Second stop: The High School Pitch. This was a nightmare. They used combination goals—the ones that have hockey markings too. Their youth 11s looked taller. I measured: 24 feet wide, but only 7.5 feet high. Now I had 24×7.5ft. Two different measurements for the same setup (youth 11v11). This is where the headache started.
Third stop: The Borough Council Pitches. These were brand new. The goals looked sturdy and professional. I measured again: 21 feet wide, 7 feet high. Back to the first measurement. Why was the high school pitch different? Probably because they used whatever old stock they had lying around and called it “close enough.”
I realized relying on physical measurements of poorly managed local fields was useless. I needed the official rulebook. I had to dive into the messy world of governing bodies—and that’s where the real complexity hit.
Cracking the Regulation Code: Age Groups are Everything
When you start digging into youth sports standards, you find out fast that no one agrees. FIFA sets the maximum size, but every country and every regional league makes their own rules for the transition phases. “Youth 11-a-side” is a sliding scale based on the kid’s age and how fast the league wants to rush them to the full size.
I finally tracked down the local FA guidance—they call these “intermediate sizes.” This is crucial because it showed me why I kept getting 21x7ft in some places and 24x8ft (full size) in others.
Here’s the deal I hammered out after three hours of cross-referencing PDFs and confusing charts. This is the progression for youth 11-a-side goals:
- U13/U14 Age Groups: This is the classic intermediate stage. They play 11v11 on a large, but not full-sized, pitch. The goals are typically 21 feet wide by 7 feet high. This is where most local leagues start the transition.
- U15/U16 Age Groups: This is where things get blurry. Some leagues stick with 21x7ft, but many start pushing toward the full size. Some use a weird interim size, like the 24x7ft (full width, slightly reduced height), but the most common goal is now 24 feet wide by 8 feet high. They just jump straight to the adult standard.
- The Exception (The American Way): If you’re looking at US Youth Soccer, they often use metrics and sometimes suggest 6.4m x 2.1m (which is close to 21x7ft) for the U13/U14 bracket, before mandating full size (7.32m x 2.44m, or 24x8ft) for U15 and up.
The bottom line I figured out? If your kid is U13 or U14 playing 11-a-side, you are almost certainly looking at a 21x7ft goal. That 3-foot reduction in width and 1-foot reduction in height makes a massive difference in how goalies train and how players shoot.
Why Did I Bother? The Coach Incident
You might think, why spend all this time arguing about a foot here or there? Well, it matters for training. If you’re practicing shots on a smaller goal, you need to adjust your target area. But mostly, it matters because people cut corners.
A few weeks after I finished this deep dive, my nephew’s team was playing an away game. The home team showed up, and their goals were definitely not 21×7. They were those horrible U10 goals—the 16x6ft ones. They were tiny. The home coach argued they were the only ones they had that week.
I marched right over to the ref, pulled out the printed-out FA guidance I’d meticulously prepared, and showed him exactly what the regulation required for U13s in our regional league: 21x7ft minimum. I pointed out that playing on 16x6ft goals completely compromises the game for 11v11 standards.
The ref was annoyed but couldn’t argue with the printed facts. They had to borrow goals from an adjacent field set up for older kids, which delayed the game by thirty minutes. But we played on the right size goal that day, and my nephew got three saves because he wasn’t expecting a pea shooter game.
That’s why I share this messy process. Because sometimes, you have to be the annoying parent/uncle who actually reads the rulebook and checks the dimensions, or the kids end up playing on whatever junk the local parks department rolled out. Don’t trust the coach; measure it yourself, and know what the regulation says for that crucial U13 age bracket!
If you’re buying a net or setting up practice goals, stick to the 21x7ft for the first years of 11v11. Anything else is just confusing the keepers.