Football Pitch Performance Standards (A) 
1) Total (live) vegetative ground cover, including grass density: Bare and thin or worn areas, as well as decaying-dead vegetation, negatively impact on the overall impression of a pitch and they also affect the playing experience. Ideally live ground cover will be very high, being mostly desirable grass species. Measuring thin and bare, as well as decaying-dead, areas, or their development, helps to provide an indication of the impact play might be having and this can influence pitch playability and the need to postpone matches where conditions are unsuitable. The impact of a wide range of maintenance practices will also affect the total ground cover and the density of the grasses, but also the playing of games under wet, soft conditions will significantly increase the amount of divoting and wear that takes place. Having a match cancellation policy to help protect the longevity of the surface is essential if a suitable standard of surface is to be provided for the entire playing season, not just the early part.
Regular mowing of a pitch will contribute to keeping a suitably dense sward, as well as reducing the build-up of large grass cuttings which are more likely to clump together and then smother and weaken the sward if the cuttings are not adequately dispersed.
The density of a sward would be measured in how many live shoots are present per dm2 (this being 10cm x 10cm in area). This would encourage grounds keepers to nurture a dense sward rather than one that has a few individual grasses with large leaves that take up a relatively large surface area. Actual values would depend on the desired species and sown cultivars, but there would be more of a focus on producing a dense sward rather than just focusing on ground cover alone.
Parameters for live ground coverage might range from a minimum of 96% for first class pitches to maybe 40% live ground cover for basic entry quality pitches. However, having an understanding of how an overall quality has been arrived at will also be an important part of managing a pitch. Different areas of a pitch might be allocated different standards, whilst an analysis of a pitch would want to reflect the size of the relevant areas being assessed. For example, a goal mouth area is going to wear that much quicker than a wing area, and the weighting in any overall analysis for the different areas should not be the same due to the size of these areas.
An example of ensuring that the different areas are represented proportionately within an analysis of live ground cover can be given for a football pitch of 6,500m² as follows:
• Penalty boxes and goal mouths (20.5% of total pitch area): 55%
• Centre circle (4% of total pitch area): 60%
• Wings (38% of total pitch area): 90%
• Central strip (37.5% of total pitch area): 70%
Total live ground cover over the entire pitch: 74.1%
See ‘PQS, Managing for’ and also ‘Performance Standard’, for an illustration of example performance standards for five different grades of quality.
2) Bare (and decaying-dead) area: This is the difference between the total live vegetative cover and the total composition of a defined area. For a football pitch this might therefore be given as from no more than 5% to a maximum of 50%. However, zones within the pitch might be identified with different acceptable parameters, for example, a goal mouth late in the season might be acceptable as 100% bare in lower quality pitches, whilst wings will always have no more than 30% bare area. This standard might also be split into two separate standards of a) Bare area, and b) decaying-dead vegetative cover.
3) Desirable grass coverage: The higher the content of suitable desirable grasses, the better the playing surface. Typically, the desirable grass is perennial ryegrass, but occasionally other species might be included, such as smooth stalked meadow grass or tall fescue. Being able to identify the desirable grass species will help to better understand the consequences of different maintenance activities, along with the influence usage has on the surface. A parameter of 90% might be the target for high level pitches, yet a minimum of 40% or 50% might be suitable for basic levels of quality.