“We are on the runway. We seem to think we’re up in the air and have landed in Barbados,” said England’s most-capped player Fara Williams.
“We aren’t taking the smaller steps to make the game professional.”
Williams made that comment on the Boots, Balls & Bras podcast in response to Chelsea manager Emma Hayes calling for undersoil heating. Hayes made her comment after Chelsea’s Women’s Super League (WSL) game against Liverpool at Kingsmeadow was postponed after six minutes because of a frozen pitch in January.
The postponement raised the issue of huge discrepancies in infrastructure within even the top tiers of women’s football. The Athletic asked clubs, players, managers and other experts what the sport needs to do.
What about undersoil heating?
“You’d start from scratch,” said Paul Fletcher, former commercial director of Wembley Stadium. “A big bulldozer would dig a metre below the pitch, put in a substructure, mainly sand and drainage pipes, then the heating system.”
It would cost at least £750,000 to build a new pitch with undersoil heating — Kingsmeadow, Chelsea women’s home ground, would cost around £1.3million. Work would have to start as soon as the last ball was kicked at the end of the season and we haven’t mentioned soaring energy…
