Your pitch is competing with a concert for the same weekend

Stadium owners need non-matchday revenue, and the surface players land on is what pays for it.

A modern stadium is a fixed cost that sits idle most of the year. Roughly two dozen home fixtures, a handful of hours of use each, against a mortgage and a maintenance bill that run continuously. The commercial answer is obvious: sell the building to somebody else the rest of the time.

That means concerts, other codes, conferences, and in some cities a second club sharing the same turf. Each of those brings revenue that genuinely funds the football. Each also costs the surface something. Staging a concert involves covering the grass for days while it is deprived of light, driving heavy equipment across it, and then repairing whatever is left in the window before the next fixture. Groundstaff can do remarkable things quickly, and there is a limit.

The players get the consequence. A surface that is patched, soft in places, or newly relaid holds the boot differently, and everyone who has played on a re-laid pitch in autumn knows what that feels like. Clubs almost never say so publicly, because criticising the surface means criticising the commercial calendar their own board approved.

Hybrid pitches, grow lights and undersoil systems exist precisely to widen the tolerance, and they represent a large capital outlay whose real business case is not player welfare at all. It is availability of the venue for non-sporting hire. That is worth saying plainly: the technology protecting the surface was mostly bought to allow more events on it.

Retractable pitch trays solve the problem properly and cost a fortune, which is why only a handful of venues have them.

Where I would push is disclosure. Publish the events calendar for every stadium alongside the fixture list, and let anyone assess how many non-sporting days sit between matches. Surface quality assessments already happen in some competitions; make them public too.

Supporters will accept a concert. What they should not accept is a hamstring being blamed on training load in a week when the grass was under a stage until Thursday.

The building has two customers. Only one of them can get hurt.