Portsmouth chief details future of Fratton Park pitch with state-of-the-art upgrade planned
Pompey’s pitch is undergoing summer renovation - but Blues have bigger plans
Fratton Park’s annual pitch renovation is underway - but Andy Cullen is adamant a new state-of-the-art playing surface remains on the agenda.
As is customary during each summer, work is currently taking place to repair and reseed the Blues’ pitch, which hosted 28 competitive fixtures last season in terms of men, women and youth team games.
In the long-term, the Blues are committed to introducing a sand-based hybrid pitch with undersoil heating, thereby enabling them to host more matches at Fratton across a season.
For the time being, though, providing the ‘optimum playing surface’ through regular summer work is their focus.
Pompey chief executive Andy Cullen told The News: ‘We are currently carrying out our annual renovation, which is something we have to do every year to provide the optimum playing surface.
‘That involves stripping all the debris out of the pitch, resanding it and then restitching the carpet underneath the pitch, which provides more stability in terms of re-growth. That is a project which will probably take a week to complete.
‘It is then re-seeded and we will give it 6-7 weeks of growth, which is necessary. We must give the grass not just the time to germinate and grow, but to provide the best structure we possibly can so we have a pitch which can last the whole season.
‘We do need a new pitch in years to come and would look to install a hybrid pitch. The grass pitch with plaster fibre growth is becoming more the norm now across all professional sports.
‘We need a more robust pitch to be able to stage other things - in addition to 28 matches we might play on the pitch during the season with the women and FA Youth Cup games.’
Pompey Women played at Fratton Park three times last season, including a final-day 4-0 victory over Blackburn which kept them in the Women’s Championship.
As for John Mousinho’s team, they totalled 24 league and cup matches at Fratton Park last season. With 11 wins from 23 matches in the Championship, the Blues were their league’s eighth best-performing team at home for 2024-25.
In addition, their sole cup fixture on the south coast was a 1-0 defeat to Millwall in the Carabao Cup.
Cullen added: ‘This would give us the ability to do more on our pitch, so, for example, it might provide the opportunity for the women to play all their games at Fratton Park.
‘It would also provide the potential to stage some other events in the summer, as some other clubs do.
‘We would like to do one or two more community matches, as we saw when bringing Alan Knight’s charity football match to Fratton Park, which was massively well supported and did brilliantly raising £40,000 for three charities.’