UEFA Move Toward a Performance Standard for Natural Turf

December 5, 2019 · Sports Labs

UEFA Europe’s football governing body presented on the journey toward producing a standard for natural grass pitches at the recent SAPCA Technical Conference. UEFA are working closely with a number of pitch Consultants to develop guidance to regulate elite playing surfaces so that some consistency can be brought to bear on pitches used in their competitions.

The standard set will not be a hard and fast set of criteria, rather it will embrace the concept of assessing a playing surface, bench-marking it in terms of where it might be on a scale of 1 to 5 with the lower digits being poor and the higher digits top rated. The goal would be to implement pitch improvement programmes to increase the playing surface as close to 5 as possible.

There are many aspects of pitch performance which feed into the score, such as physical properties, soil properties and grass properties. It is hoped that by standardising the assessment it will work to help improve the outcome in terms of playing surface performance and aesthetic considerations.