Football fields: technology 2.0

A technical meeting took place within EIMA International on maintenance of sporting facilities. Quality of turf has become a requirement for good performance, aesthetics and overall entertainment experience

Professional sport is mostly made of show business, and therefore requires high-performance surfaces where athletes can exhibit, to ensure pure spectacularity and regular performance of events. Based on this assumption, a workshop was organized by KultureMultimedia and promoted by Toro Pratoverde, Sofisport and Bottos entitled “Performance, Spectacularity & Business: the 2.0 turf”, held on Thursday 10 November 2016 within Eima International.

Considering that football is the most popular sport in Italy, the meeting presented a work in progress to create a synergy between businesses producing turfs and maintenance machines and federal bodies, responsible for the definition of manufacturing regulations.

While a few years ago, football fields’ grass was cut using traditional machines, maybe slightly modified for the specific requirements of this sport – as it appeared during the meeting – today, are used machines from the world of golf, that offer high performance with businesses trading in this sector.

Therefore, today are available different types of turf: natural, hybrid and synthetic and machines have to adapt to them accordingly.

Among many examples illustrated during the meeting, can be mentioned the Luigi Ferrari football stadium in Genoa, that after dealing for a long time with problems related to surface maintenance, chose a hybrid turf, that seems to provide excellent results, ensuring the highest functionality for sports purposes and at the same time reducing to a minimum the need for maintenance.