Non-league football, artificial turf and innovation with two faces
Non-league football, artificial turf and innovation with two faces
You’re not astro anymore!
To kick off this week's newsletter I want to talk about Malo Gusto’s red card for Chelsea against Aston Villa on Sunday.
Gusto lunged in on the touchline with studs showing and caught Lucas Digne in that way that bends the ankle where it's not built to bend.
Referee Jared Gillett, who'd already attracted attention for a curious choice to curtail first-half stoppage time and would later make a spectacularly bad decision not to play an advantage, gave the foul and showed a yellow card.
The VAR team suggested he have a look, which he did. And then another. And then another, and another, and another. And more. Eventually Gusto was dismissed on review.
Gillett's extended consideration gave the unhelpful impression that it was a close decision when in fact it was inevitable as soon as he was instructed to reconsider.
It was inevitable because of one of the many problems with the spirit of VAR. This might not have been a clear and obvious error – it was an error, in my view, but that’s just me – but it was a clear and obvious foul despite the very special protestations of global Chels Twitter.
Set the bar for overturning a decision wherever you want. It simply cannot be expected that a referee sees that foul replayed and doesn't conclude it's a red.
It's too counter-intuitive. An official knows that it's a red, knows why it's a red, and instinctively needs to upgrade it to a red. The threshold for reversing the decision doesn't come into it. This is re-refereeing and we'll come to regret it.
Non-league football, artificial turf and innovation with two faces
Follow a non-league football team away from home and you’ll notice that artificial pitches are increasingly common. They’re far removed from the plastic pitches at Luton Town, Queens Park Rangers and others in the eighties, and they’re everywhere.
Around half of the opponents in the division my team competes in have 3G artificial pitches and that proportion seems to get bigger and bigger. Eighth tier English football is a world of community clubs, wealthyish benefactors and grants. Most clubs need to stand on their own two feet and that requires income.
Installing a pitch that can be used all week and all year is a great way to bring in that money. It’s a source of continuous income from pitch bookings, not to mention the grant-grabbing potential that comes with providing vital community access to a sports pitch.
Since the start of the 2023/24 season I’ve seen Coventry Sphinx play on artificial surfaces at Sutton Coldfield Town and Quorn. Bedworth United and Sporting Khalsa have played at Sphinx and the return fixtures will be played on what we used to call “astro” along with Coleshill Town, Harborough Town and Boldmere St Michaels, among others.
Artificial pitches within just a few miles of where I’m writing include Rugby Borough, Racing Club Warwick and the home of Coventry Rugby, who have a football tenant who play in the ninth tier. When you consider the problems that have dogged Godmanchester Rovers since the middle of last season, it’s easy to understand why.
This is just run-of-the-mill stuff for the non-league game, such that it barely warrants a second thought beyond considerations around footwear and tactics. But it’s also a strange phenomenon. Unlike virtually every other innovation in English football that doesn’t involve testing out new laws on the lowly, artificial turf is taking root primarily in the National League System.
There are three main categories of football pitch recognised by FIFA: mud, cinder and concrete.
Only joking. Officially official football can be played on natural grass, hybrid grass or synthetic grass. Natural grass is grass. Hybrid grass is, broadly, grass with reinforced rootzone that’s either grown from a synthetic base or stitched with synthetic fibres for durability. Synthetic grass is not grass.
The FIFA standard is 3G, which refers to third-generation synthetic grass with infill – nowadays, that’s black rubber crumb rather than sand or nails or whatever they used in 2G pitches.
“FIFA has an established Quality Programme for Football Turf, and only products that are compliant with this programme should be considered as suitable football turf,” says FIFA in its process guidelines.
“This programme covers licensed manufacturers whose products are specifically designed to ensure that they deliver in terms of playing performance, safety, durability and quality assurance. The programme then requires a specific on-site performance test to ensure each installation is of the correct standard.”
Though FIFA is generally regarded as not recognising 4G as an approved football surface its website does contain a reference to an uncertified 4G product from the AstroTurf Corporation if you look hard enough. I digress.
The advancement of artificial, all-weather, multipurpose football pitches makes sense. Technological development is central to the entire human experience. We’re driven to move forwards. We’re problem-solvers and money-makers. When it comes to staging and improvising and monetising football, that means removing imperfections and inconveniences.
In other parts of the world, the artificial pitch is no stranger to top-tier football. Here, grass is strictly favoured. That should encourage questions about the unusual upside-down adoption of artificial pitches outside the professional game.
The aforementioned benefits do represent a positive to counteract the negative. Premier League and EFL surfaces are better than we have in non-league – if they weren’t, they’d be made of something else – but for teams lower down the pecking order an artificial pitch can be as much an opportunity as pitch itself is a necessity.
The obvious advantages include a weatherproofiness that one simply doesn’t get with grass. They aren’t prone to waterlogging (nor entirely immune to it) and sweeping a sprinkling of English snow off them isn’t much bother. We don’t think about it often but artificial pitches also withstand drought rather better than grass.
But 3G football pitches are expensive, inconsistent from place to place (especially when teams are playing on grass every other week) and possibly dangerous in ways we don’t yet fully understand.
That’s fine. But non-league football is the place where these surfaces are found but can least be afforded. It’s also where the players can least afford to be canaries in the coalmine.
3G pitches get hot and there are studies that have identified an increased risk of anterior cruciate ligament injuries and concussions from artificial pitches as well as such delights as turf toe, foot lock and turf burns.
Environmental concerns must be considered too. In this day and age the prevailing progress should be towards more natural sports surfaces, not fewer.
3G football pitches are not carbon-neutral. The production and transportation of artificial turf produce greenhouse gases and the problem runs deeper than that when fake replaces real. The oxygen production and carbon dioxide processing from grass are apparently higher than they are from an equivalent area of forest.
Being worse than deforestation is a burden for which non-league football should not be responsible. Leaching chemicals into the water supply from a metric ton of rubber crumb every Saturday night is a burden for which your washing machine should not be responsible.
Even the affordability argument, proven time and again in non-league, has its flaws. When clubs apply for funding for these expensive facilities they typically need to come up with a good chunk of the outlay first. They also need replacing – every ten years, according to FIFA guidelines – and that’s no joke when it comes to the pursestrings.
Yet 3G pitches also make economic sense. They bring in money from constant use as bookable facilities or community assets that unlock funding. Teams can train in bad weather. They play games that would otherwise have been postponed, often enjoying a bumper gate as a result.
To maximise that opportunity they’ll have floodlights on every night but we’ll stick a pin in the financial and environmental cost of that for now.
Artificial surfaces aren’t going away. They’ll creep up the divisions as the technology improves. 4G might prove a watershed in that regard. But they’ll never be ubiquitous because, at the top of the game, hybrid pitches are the present and the future – and there’s plenty of grass in those.
The preference for natural and natural-based hybrid pitches is there for a reason. If football at the top prefers grass to 3G, then football underneath deserves to be better informed and better prepared if the prevalence of those surfaces is to grow.
There’s been a lot of research into artificial sports surfaces around the world but the knowledge and improved products that come from it isn’t available to English football’s least wealthy.
More research – more specific research – is needed. Non-league is played differently than professional football or American football, and by different people.
They train less. They have other jobs. Their bodies are not the same. The literature in that regard is non-existent. Yet, of all the players involved in the game, these are the most impacted by any injuries and ill health that should come their way.
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“This is what Macclesfield Town looked like. This is what Bury looked like. This is what Hereford United looked like. This is what Chester City looked like. This is what Maidstone United looked like. This is what Aldershot looked like. This is what Newport County looked like.”
Shit’s getting real at Scunthorpe United.
Salty beef extracts
Aston Villa's journey to Warsaw showed us the soul of football (House of V)
Football keeps talking when it should be listening (Why Are You Like This?)
Southend all at sea; an update from the edge of oblivion (Unexpected Delirium)
Brighton’s long march from the brink of extinction to the promised land of European football (i)
Ange Postecoglou’s bullshit vacuum makes it impossible not to love him (i)
EFC: Beautiful Chaos (Terrace Edition)
Football fans received 11,000 gambling messages in Premier League opening weekend (The Guardian)
Snus use by footballers: PFA to conduct study into use of tobacco product (BBC Sport)
Dessert
New Balance are making hay while their Bukayo Saka sun shines, and why not? The Saka signature Furon v7 Seven Edition is a peach.
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