By David Owen
October 31 – The venue for the final of next year’s women’s World Cup in Canada will need to seek recertification in January, to verify that its artificial pitch surface remains of the necessary quality.
A list of FIFA-recommended artificial pitches discloses that the certification period for BC Place in Vancouver, in western Canada, ends on 21 January 2015. It thus faces retesting at around this time to check that it remains compliant with FIFA’s two star quality standard.
This should be a routine process. However, the retesting of this and other women’s World Cup venues looks set to be unusually closely scrutinised now that the tournament’s use of artificial surfaces has become an issue.
An elite group of international players are fighting to play on natural grass and have filed a lawsuit at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal in Toronto. The row this week prompted FIFA secretary-general Jérôme Valcke to release detailed public comments, emphasising that “stadiums and training sites will be of the highest standard, which means, in terms of the FIFA quality programme, two stars”.
Valcke added: “I want to reiterate FIFA’s commitment to making sure that all pitches at the official stadiums and training sites will be of this two-star quality.”
Other World Cup venues facing testing/retesting in coming months are understood to include Montreal and Winnipeg.
BC Place, which has a seating capacity of 54,500, hosted both opening and closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010. The home base of the Vancouver Whitecaps soccer team and the BC Lions Canadian Football team, the venue reopened in September 2011 following installation of a retractable roof. It is due to host the Grey Cup, the championship game of the Canadian Football League, next month. The boy band One Direction are scheduled to play there less than two weeks after the women’s World Cup final next July.
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