If you flip through the matchday programmes of the second half of the 2013/2014 season, you will notice a relentless, simultaneous corporate bombardment. While FC Groningen was publicly struggling with the deteriorating quality of its natural grass at the Euroborg—even fighting a €20,000 fine from the KNVB over a frozen pitch—the advertising pages of their own magazine were staging a massive intervention. In every single issue of the spring campaign, two rival artificial turf manufacturers, FieldTurf and GreenFields, were buying premium ad space to aggressively pitch their plastic solutions.

Page 8 of the May 2014 edition showcases the GreenFields offensive. The advertisement is a brilliant piece of B2B marketing, featuring a map of the Netherlands made entirely of artificial turf, pinpointing the exact locations of professional clubs that had already surrendered to the plastic revolution. The most provocative detail? The club sitting at the very top of their client list is Heracles Almelo. Heracles were the absolute pioneers of artificial turf in the Eredivisie, and ironically, they were the exact team visiting the Euroborg that afternoon.

For the FC Groningen board, reading their own matchday booklet must have felt like a psychological siege. Every two weeks, they were reminded by both FieldTurf and GreenFields that their Eredivisie rivals were switching to weather-proof, low-maintenance artificial surfaces. The artificial turf lobby was aggressively pushing the narrative that plastic was the only reliable future for Dutch football, and they were using Groningen’s own printing press to deliver the message.

A Look into the Future

Despite the immense, bi-weekly pressure from these simultaneous advertising campaigns, FC Groningen stubbornly resisted the plastic temptation. They chose the harder, more expensive path of investing heavily in hybrid grass technology and better undersoil heating. History ultimately vindicated the Pride of the North. By the 2020s, a massive backlash from Eredivisie players and fans against the physical toll and unnatural bounce of artificial pitches forced the KNVB to implement a phased ban on plastic turf in the top flight. The map shown in this 2014 advertisement eventually shrank, proving that Groningen’s stubborn refusal to yield to the “plastic siege” was the right choice all along.