Comment by tarl0s

In Italy we definitely often use "campo da calcio" as a quick measurement unit for areas. I'm guessing that's due to the fact that for most people using squared meters is really limited to measuring housing areas and other few use cases, so reverting to something that everybody knows well (a football field) is much more effective. For distances, everybody is very comfortable using all powers of 10 of the meter for all kind of purposes so there's no need to use references to real world measurements.