Man Utd legend Gary Neville launches campaign to save Britain's 50 worst football pitches

Gary Neville has launched a major grassroots initiative to improve 50 of the worst pitches in Britain. The legend is fronting a nationwide campaign to help Sunday league teams who play on lunar landscapes with barely-distinguishable line markings, or surfaces pockmarked by ’ mess and broken glass, to enjoy smarter, safer pitches.

pundit Neville threw his support behind the scheme because football’s professional branches cannot flourish if the roots are decaying. The former England defender and part-owner of Salford City has been signed by optical giants Specsavers to head their Best Worst Pitch initiative - which will provide 50 clubs with line-painting and pitch maintenance equipment.

Neville, 50, said: “Anyone who has played football at one point or another has played on a dodgy pitch. Grassroots football is the foundation of our sport and it’s great to be a part of the Best Worst Pitch initiative supporting the communities and volunteers who make it possible.”

This weekend’s final and the all-English final in Bilbao will be played on pristine surfaces. But on the bottom rungs of the ladder, hard-up councils are stretched for financial resources to provide professional line-painting equipment, GPS mapping, pitch maintenance equipment and ground staff training.

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Responsibility for maintaining pitches in public spaces often falls on volunteers - including pre-match ‘sweeps’ of the playing area to clear it of debris or canine calling cards.

Specsavers are long-standing investors in the grassroots community with their annual search to find Britain’s ‘best worst team’. Their current ‘champions’ are Somerset League strugglers Tunley Athletic, whose chairman Craig Doughty admitted: “It’s a real slog sometimes - every week, rain or shine, I’m out there doing two full laps of the pitch just to get the lines marked.

"The equipment we’ve got is ancient—it clogs, it leaks, and it takes twice as long as it should. On dark evenings or when the wind’s howling, it feels like it takes forever. But I do it because I love this club—it means everything to the community.”

Where professional football was once played on pitches resembling Amazon swamps, or sandy beaches after the tide has gone out, most clubs in all four divisions enjoy billiard-table surfaces.

But further down the scale, obscure markings and uneven grass pitches are a major problem or even a health hazard. And clubs on the lowest steps of the pyramid cannot afford to install all-weather, low-maintenance 3G pitches.

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