Artificial grass and genuine football: The evolution of artificial turf

Abstract

The article formulates, solves and draws inference from a game model in-tended to shed light on the evolution of artificial turf in professional Europeanfootball (soccer). The main results indicate that the quality of teams (sportsperformance-wise) defines which of the teams choose to play on artificial turf andwhich not. Furthermore, teams with low quality are predicted to be the “artificialturf pioneers”, both model-wise, as well as indicated by some empirical exampleswith data taken from the Norwegian, Swedish and Dutch leagues. The fact that ar-tificial turf may play a significant role also in the evolution of uncertainty of outcomeis interesting and commented on in the conclusion.