It is the legacy project that the departing Football Association chairman Greg Dyke believes will “transform football”, and later this year work will begin on the £230 million plan to build around 500 new 3G pitches in what the governing body describes as “hubs” in English towns and cities.
Starting in Sheffield, in partnership with the government and the Premier League, it will eventually result in 3G hubs at the heart of football development in England – raising the number of pitches from a total of 639 last year to more than 1,000, with a projected 130 per cent rise in towns and cities.
They can be played on 80 hours a week, as opposed to the five hours a week the natural grass version can withstand.
It is English football’s brave new future, following in the footsteps – naturally – of Germany where there are 3,735 public-access 3G pitches.
It is a question that one person in the multi-million pound 3G industry complained to me this week “rears its head every so often and has to be dealt with”. Those cautioning against 3G have a powerful new advocate, Nigel Maguire, 52, a former NHS trust chief executive whose son Lewis, 18, has the blood cancer, Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
When we spoke this week, Nigel, from Brompton-on-Swale in North Yorkshire, was back in hospital with Lewis who went into remission in 2014 after his first course of chemotherapy but fell ill after Christmas and was diagnosed with a recurrence of the disease. Lewis will also undergo autologous stem cell transplants to replace the bone marrow that he is expected to lose as a result of the chemotherapy.
For Nigel, a former nurse who took early retirement from NHS Cumbria to care for his son, these are the most difficult of times. Lewis is an excellent schoolboy goalkeeper who was on trial at Leeds United when the cancer was first diagnosed and, while Nigel makes no direct allegations, he wants installation of all 3G pitches to cease while tests are carried out on the rubber crumb, which comes from recycled tyres.
Lewis Maguire who has cancer, with his father Nigel Photo: CASCADE NEWS
There is roughly 100 metric tonnes of rubber crumb on every 3G pitch and Nigel, whose son played on them every week, believes that the carcinogenic elements of the crumb, especially on hot days, have not been fully understood. His son dived into it, inadvertently swallowed it and, most likely, had it enter his cuts and grazes.
Nigel worked in public health long enough to know, as he points out, the dangers of “scaremongering”, but he is unequivocal on the case of rubber crumb. “Sports bodies in this country must invest in research,” he says, “at the moment we are conducting an industrial scale-experiment on our children – and that’s not good enough.”
Nigel has only recently made the connection between rubber crumb and lymphoma but the publicity that Lewis’s case has attracted has already yielded intriguing anecdotal evidence. Nigel has heard of footballers on 3G pitches complaining of black-coloured mucus and groundsmen who would rather use masks and gloves to handle rubber crumb, also extensively used in equestrian centres, being forbidden from doing so.
The most alarming allegations against rubber crumb have come from the United States where it has been investigated by the 272-cap former US women’s international Julie Foudy. Her former international team-mate, the goalkeeper Amy Griffin, has a list of 200 athletes who played on synthetic turf who have developed cancer. Of those 158 are footballers and, of that number, 101 are goalkeepers.
In her ESPN investigation Foudy uncovered conflicting attitudes towards rubber crumb from US authorities at state and federal level. California’s recycling agency CalRecycle spent $45 million (£31 million) in 14 years in grants to cities and schools for pitches, running tracks and playgrounds using recycled rubber from the 6.3 million used tyres the state had to dispose of annually.
Yet California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment is running a $2.9 million (£2 million) study into synthetic surfaces which will report in June 2018. Foudy reported that the nationwide Consumer Product Safety Commission, which said in 2008 that rubber crumb was “safe to play on”, now harbours serious doubts about that ruling.
Questions remain over the rubber crumb infill
The FA has seen the Foudy investigation, and it is aware of concerns in the US but says “3G pitches in the UK which are built to industry-standard specifications are safe”. So, too, does the Premier League’s Football Foundation, which has joint-funded 550 new 3G pitches since 2000; as well as rugby union’s RFU and England Hockey. The FA believes it has already answered the questions that Nigel Maguire is asking.
Those UK governing bodies are working on the basis of 44 independent reports and pieces of research from the US and Europe into rubber crumb from 1998 to 2014 all of which found no significant risk to health. Over the past 12 months the independent laboratory Labosport has assessed rubber crumb to the same standards that British, European and US toy manufacturers must meet and discovered no toxicology issues.
The industry body Sports and Play Construction Association represents 230 UK companies involved in the various aspects of playing surface construction. In a statement to Telegraph Sport, it said that synthetic pitches helped “millions of people around the world to lead healthier lifestyles” by providing surfaces usable in all weathers.
SAPCA said: “There have been numerous research studies carried out worldwide on the use of rubber crumb in sports pitches to assess any potential health impact. The current consensus from those studies is that the rubber crumb poses no significant health risk.”
Nigel Maguire has that list of research provided by the FA and the other governing bodies. He plans to look at each study individually with the help of experts to assess what relevance it has to rubber crumb on UK 3G pitches, and whether it still covers current day tyres which have new chemical compounds introduced all the time.
As for the FA, the building of the hubs of 3G pitches and the rubber crumb infill starts as scheduled, with Premier League and government backing, and confidence in the research thus far.
Cahill's axe offers cautionary tale of China's riches
A very lucrative semi-retirement in China’s Super League is becoming a reality for many footballers but the story of Tim Cahill is a cautionary one. His contract at Shanghai Shenhua was abruptly cancelled this week amid suggestions that the Chinese were not impressed with the former Everton man talking about the “crazy” salaries on offer there.
Tim Cahill has found himself out of a job
In an interview before his contract termination, Cahill, 36, also said of the Chinese “when they want something, they get it and when they don’t want something they get rid of it”. A prescient point. In the meantime, he is said to be keen to get a new contract elsewhere in China.
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