For the final time this regular season D.C. United will play on a field with football lines when it visits the Houston Dynamo at Robertson Stadium on Saturday. Eleven years into Major League Soccer, its one of the regular annoyances players still endure as six clubs currently share fields with football teams.
“We all prefer to play in [London’s] Wembley Stadium. You play with what you get, and both teams play on the same surface so it doesn’t matter,” said United assistant coach Tommy Soehn. Yet D.C. is 0-1-2 in its last three games on football fields, including a 1-1 with the New England Revolution three weeks ago on a divot-ridden field at Foxborough Stadium worn by the Patriots.
“It does make it really choppy down the middle of the field, which makes it difficult to keep the ball on the ground and keep possession,” said D.C. midfielder Brian Carroll. “It ends up being more long balls and more tackling, a more ugly game.”
But it’s the television viewer that suffers most.
“To play on it is one thing, it’s not great, but visually, on television, that’s when it really bugs people,” said United midfielder Ben Olsen. “It’s tough to see the game how it should be seen.”
The number of football stadiums in MLS will be reduced to three or fewer by the end of the decade. But the playing surface has been of some concern at Pizza Hut Park outside of Dallas, which opened last year and hosts the MLS Cup final in November.
The Frisco Independent School District, which helped finance the soccer-specific stadium, uses it for football games. Five are scheduled there this fall, the last coming on Oct. 12.
The final will be played Nov. 12, and the stadium’s football lines are put down with a water-based paint and scrub clean easily, said FC Dallas spokesman German Sferra.
“You won’t be able to see any lines come MLS Cup,” said Sferra, who said the field surface, which was replaced last August, also has not been a complaint. “The grass has held up incredibly well.”
