Best way to move a player (touch based) using the event system in Unity 5?

As the title says, I want to migrate my player movement to use the new Event System in Unity 5.

In my current project, I use Physics.raycast to determine if the player has tapped/clicked on the ground and tell my player controller to navigate to this point.

Since I read somewhere in the forum that it's better to use the EventSystem to handle interactions with the world in order for the UI to consume clicks; I was wondering what is the best way to achieve this?

I can only think of 2 ways to implement it that doesn't sound too good.

1. Put a Ground script on every ground gameObject and make it implement IPointerDownHandler to receive the event and notify the player.

2. Make a big "invisible box" in front of the camera that will receive events using IPointerDownHandler on which I have to perform a raycast to check the object behind the pointer.