Football Pitch Maintenance Comparisons: 1990 to 2020

This entry takes a brief look at how maintenance inputs and expectations of quality have changed over a 30-year, or so, period. The majority of maintenance activities are the same now as then, although overall there is a much greater emphasis on attention to detail and increasing the inputs for medium to intermediate, as well as high even, quality pitches.

For local authority-maintained football pitches, aiming (in general) for an entry to medium level of quality in the early 1990s with about 100 games played, this may have typically seen wing areas being around 60%-75% ground coverage by the end of the playing season, whilst the central and penalty areas may have been 20%-50% coverage, excluding the goal mouth area which will typically be pretty bare of grass cover.

With significant improvements in pitch quality at professional clubs and with exposure from media there has been an increasing expectation at grassroots clubs, where many games are played on local authority pitches.

Entry (or basic) grade pitches are not appreciated by players and whilst this might be endured on pitches with a heavy soil type, a minimum of medium to intermediate quality would now be the expectation or aspiration for clubs, so in practice the expected quality levels have moved up one level.

This would now mean pitches with maybe 80-90% ground cover on the wings and 30-70% cover in the central and penalty areas towards the end of the playing season. The main point is that the pitch sward is expected to be visibly better than 30 years ago, which in turn was better than even earlier in the 1980s and 1970s when mud bath pitches were not uncommon midway through the season.

Previously where maintenance inputs might have been 120 to 150 hours to meet minimum expectations, the current level of input, to achieve 2 or 3 games per week, might be nearer 300 to 350 hours for a medium quality of pitch to maybe 450 to 550 for an intermediate level quality of pitch. Much depends on the additional attention to detail that is provided in pitch preparation, but especially post-match pitch repairs, as well as the consistency of achieving the full, or where appropriate a more limited, range of performance quality standards.

One example of increasing maintenance inputs is that of regularity of mowing. During the early 1990s professional clubs, during the summer, might typically mow their main pitches on 2 or 3 occasions per week, with a few being mown on 4 occasions, whilst a few were also mown just weekly.

For grassroot pitches that are maintained to a medium or intermediate quality level a frequency of 2 or 3 occasions per week may now be a typical pattern for mowing as well, when previously for grassroots pitches the frequency would typically be just weekly or fortnightly, which was then accepted as the norm.