Artificial pitches

[Sporting]

Three recent quotes from separate threads:


"Hamilton and their shitty plastic pitch relegated.
Kilmarnock (with their shitty plastic pitch) play Dundee."

"Agree about the plastic pitches, fuck them off."

"Artificial pitches benefit clubs and the wider community.
Since Tamworth put one in they have been able to put more into the youth and reserve teams, set up a competitive women's team and open up the ground to other clubs in the local area. They've also hosted women's teams from Aston Villa and Burton in previous seasons.
And that's before you account for the fact that far fewer matches are postponed."

What's your opinion?

[Janik]

Probably about levels of play. Where clubs prime focus should be as a community hub, such as Tamworth, then they are appropriate. The benefits outweigh the issues. Higher up, the opposite becomes the case.
Basically there is no one size fits all answer.

[DCI Harry Batt]

They're great.

[ursus arctos]

There also have been absolutely massive improvements in the technology from the ones I played on in the 70s.

[Sporting]

If grass pitches were mandatory here the grass wouldn't last a month, save in a few professional clubs' grounds where usage is only once a week on average.

[NHH]

Unfortunately, the Football League's posiiton kind of creates a one-size fits all policy by banning them. I'm yet to hear an argument against them that isn't fundamentally based on conservative this-is-all-new-fangled-and-not-like-in-my-day reasoning.

[Nesta]

Occasionally, a bit of the black rubber crumb gets in a players eye. That's about it.

I'm pro. It's alright for clubs near the top of the game who have the resources to maintain a grass pitch in good condition the year round, but that isn't most of football. Watching non league games, it's noticeable that synthetic pitches tend to encourage teams to keep the ball on the ground more.

[NHH]

It also stops the pitch being the hallowed sacred space onto which none but the adept shall enter, and makes the club be able to utilise 100% of their land assets as opposed to around 25%. That means all representative teams can play at the stadium, as can kids, after work 5-a-side leagues, and throwing boards down to have mega events under marquee or bands becomes doable.

[Tommasi]

I liked when the Scottish teams said ''they play on them in the Eredivise and no one complains’ Then the big Dutch teams came out and said they won't loan any players to teams with plastic pitches anymore and they will pay teams to get rid of them.

Since there could only be 1 team in the SPL vs 11 on grass, a vote could ban them

[DCI Harry Batt]

I was told yesterday that they cause cancer. There are loads of studies in the US apparently. Although I couldn't find any, and neither could the person who told me that.

[DCI Harry Batt]

It's alright for clubs near the top of the game who have the resources to maintain a grass pitch in good condition the year round,

It's "I'm alright Jack" for them, I guess. but that doesn't make it a good use of resources, for them or for us all.

[My Name Is Ian]

Aesthetically speaking, I don't like them. I just like mud.

90% of the artificial pitches I played on were of the "QPR style, just lay some concrete down and stick half an inch of sand and a green carpet on it" variety, and they sucked (and I don't know to what extent they screwed my knees to the point that I had to stop playing at 33, but I'm pretty sure it was more than zero - I trained on one twice a week for something like twelve years), but the newer types are a considerable improvement on those, for sure.

But that's entirely a personal preference, and therefore no basis upon which to ban them. I fully understand how much of a difference they can make to the finances and community engagement for a smaller club (my local team, Worthing, has one and crowds have gone through the roof since theirs was installed, but that usually happens when a team is winning as they have been over the last couple of years, even though they haven't got much to show for it), and that trumps my literal stick-in-the-mudness over it.

It's noticeable how many parents there are at Worthing games with their small kids, and a fair proportion of them are there because their kids are involved in their youth setup. They did have problems with their pitch, though, which led to them having to play home matches elsewhere for a while, a couple of years ago.

I don't really know too much about whether they give teams that have them a significant competitive advantage - it's not as though players wouldn't have trained on them, if even if their clubs didn't have one themselves - and if they did, I'd expect that to drop over time.

And that's the thing, for me. I can't think of a good enough reason to have them banned, while they're good for smaller clubs in several different ways, both in terms of immediate money-raising opportunities, saving money, and the longer-term aspiration of helping to bring through new generations of supporters.

[Favourite Worst Nightmare]

For: I certainly think the Football League should review their policy, particularly at the lower echelons of the league, because of the community benefits mentioned above.

Against: Anyone who has played on modern plastic pitches will hopefully vouch for me when I say that the little plastic bits of mud will get everywhere after you have played. They will get into your boots, and into your kitbag, and subsequently will get into places in your place of residence where they have no right to be.

[lambers]

Yep, I can vouch for that. I haven't played football for maybe three years now, but occasionally I'll use my old astroturf boots to do some gardening, and still find the odd bit of plastic soil in them. I suspect they can breed.

[Hot Pepsi]

I was told yesterday that they cause cancer. There are loads of studies in the US apparently. Although I couldn't find any, and neither could the person who told me that.

A lot of people believe that. The science is not so clear.

https://academic.oup.com/jnci/articl...djw311/2706944

[DCI Harry Batt]

Thanks HP, that seems like a reasonable summary of some of the issues and data. I'm also surprised that more work hasn't been done.

[Uncle Ethan]

Aren't most professional club pitches now 3G hybrids anyway?

[ursus arctos]

Yes (at least at top levels), but Sutton's pitch is fully artificial, not a hybrid

Here is a list of GrassMaster hybrids (other brands are available)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GrassMaster

[jameswba]

I am a convert for reasons mentioned above. On the pitches QPR, Oldham etc used to have, it was a different game entirely. On 3G / 4G, it's the same game but a bit better since players can trust the bounce and run of the ball. Two top-division clubs in Slovakia have them, Zilina and Trencin. These clubs won three league titles between them from 2015-2017 (until Slovan Bratislava's mafia funding really took effect basically), play the most 'possession-based' football in the country and have renowned, very well-run academies, with hundreds of youngsters getting to train regularly on these surfaces.

So it's as illogical as it is unsurprising that the Slovak FA wants to ban clubs from using the surfaces. Even more illogical when they insist on running a summer-spring season, even though 'natural' pitches are barely playable from mid-Feb till early April. Every year, there's at least one groundshare in the top division too. This season, Zlate Moravce and Sered have been playing at the former's ground. The surface there has been knackered since about late August.

Far from banning 4G, they should be encouraging more clubs to install it.

[Patrick Thistle]

It does make the game a bit different and that's noticeable when I watch Cymru Premier games because those artificial pitches tend to be end of life. They aren't permanent - that's one thing people seem to forget. Barry's pitch failed the UEFA tests two summers ago so they had to play their home game at a nearby pitch for hire. (Which isn't a bad venue) Then we went to Belfast and saw Cliftonville's pitch and all I'll say is that whoever passed that was using more lenient criteria or was being leaned on while grading it.

I suppose replacing a pitch every decade rather than reseeding it every summer is an improvement? I don't know. Shrewsbury have just put in a full size artificial pitch next door to the Meadow, for all the children's and reserve teams to use along the lines of the community use discussed upthread.

I hadn't heard anything about the canceric properties of artificial pitches and would imagine there is greater risk of brain injury from heading the ball. However, there is an environmental impact in the production of artificial pitches, which is something else to bear in mind.

[Capybara]

However, there is an environmental impact in the production of artificial pitches, which is something else to bear in mind.

Yes, this is what has been going round in my head since the thread started and I decided that my mind had probably changed from anti- to pro- in recent years. The little bits of plastic seem to me like they are a bad thing, and I hadn't realised that the life of an artificial pitch was so limited. Growing grass and re-seeding seems so much better environmentally, so it's not such an easy question after all.

[Patrick Thistle]

Yeah, I'm not sure what the answer is really. I was thinking that a grass pitch would use more water for irrigation but a lot of the 4G pitches need watering and I don't know what the water usage in the industrial processes would be.

[Sporting]

Yes, this is what has been going round in my head since the thread started and I decided that my mind had probably changed from anti- to pro- in recent years. The little bits of plastic seem to me like they are a bad thing, and I hadn't realised that the life of an artificial pitch was so limited. Growing grass and re-seeding seems so much better environmentally, so it's not such an easy question after all.

Doesn't a load depend on the local climate and the amount of usage?

[DCI Harry Batt]

I'd have assumed that growing pitches would be pretty bad, environmentally.

[Sean of the Shed]

With regard to wildlife and fauna, I'd imagine that they are as lifeless as most 4G pitches, certainly those at a professional level. Then there is the fertiliser required for them and the water used would be far more excessive than what would be required for a 4G, and I seriously doubt that many clubs have rainwater capture systems at their ground either.