On June 10, the eyes of Europe will be on the Stade de France, when France and Romania play the first match in the top football tournament of the year. As the TV cameras roll, the fans roar, and the goals come, one hard-working player will be impossible to miss: the lush green championship turf.
A world-class championship needs several hectares of hard-wearing turf. Ten stadiums in ten cities will host 51 games, with another 60 training grounds for use by 24 national teams. And at the end, when the winning team lifts the trophy, the turf of the Stade de France must still look superb.
An international football tournament demands a lot from its turf and from its groundsmen. The French turf-grass register lists all the approved varieties, and ranks each one for a variety of features that groundsmen look for. The register also aggregates the feature rankings to provide an overall ranking for sports use. And the top-five ranked sports varieties were all developed by DLF researchers.
That is why the groundsmen at most of the tournament’s ten stadiums chose DLF seed for their big summer of football. To prepare for the event, they overseeded their pitches with top-performing mixtures of perennial ryegrass from the DLF brands Top Green Eurosport and Johnsons Sports Seed. Top Green Eurosport combines the fineness of leaf, the shoot density, and the wear-tolerance of its top varieties of diploid turf perennials with the persistence, stress-tolerance, and disease-resistance of 4turf.
Among the varieties listed on the French turf-grass register, two 4turf varieties stand out: Fabian and Tetrastar. These are the varieties that help French groundsmen prepare their stadiums for Europe’s finest players and their biggest TV audiences of the year.
