Plastic pitches in the top flight of Scottish football could soon become a thing of the past.

It was reported last week that Premiership clubs have brought forward a resolution which aims to ban artificial surfaces from the beginning of the 2026/27 season. This would give teams a two-year grace period in which to make the switch, afterwards it would be a requirement to play at the highest level in this country. Following Ross County's play-off final victory over Raith Rovers, Kilmarnock are the only team in the league with such a surface, but they're looking to have it replaced with a grass pitch for the start of the 2025/26 campaign. The resolution would just need nine of the 12 clubs to pass, and with all of them preferring natural to astro, that seems more than likely.

I don't know about you, but I'm very conflicted about all of this.

In fact, I take the first half of that sentence back. If you're reading this, especially if you're a fan of a top-flight club, you're probably one of the many, many thousands of supporters in this country who hate seeing plastic pitches in the Premiership. It has been a constant source of complaint ever since Kilmarnock first installed theirs in 2014, while Hamilton Accies also came up that summer with their own synthetic alternative. The tiresome debate would be killed once and for all. That in itself isn't a reason to get rid of them, but it's certainly a positive.

With greater significance, it would improve the image of the Premiership purely from an aesthetic point of view. The plastic pitches we've seen in the league – Killie, Accies, Livingston – have ranged from poor to dreadful over the years. I know this shouldn't matter much, but for a league which struggles to market itself to even its own audience, it could do without these eyesores providing the background for the talented players on centre stage. 

There's also a competitive advantage to consider. I believe it's overstated how much benefit the surface itself gives the home team over their visitors, who play on grass surfaces for the rest of the season, but it does allow clubs to do all their training on the same pitch in which they play games. That can certainly be an advantage as it gives them greater familiarity and comfort with their surroundings.

There's also the fundamental argument that, as football fans, we much prefer the sport to be played on grass. Typically, it's how we played the game growing up. It's how most 11-a-side clubs play it at the amateur level. Should it not be a prerequisite for being a football team, having a grass pitch?

Most top flight teams pay the additional income which could be invested in their first team instead, but that brings us to the first flaw in the argument that a post-plastic world would be some sort of utopia. After all, we've just had a season in which Dundee failed to keep their surface at a standard acceptable to play on several occasions. There are draining issues around Dens Park which certainly hindered the newly-promoted side, but with a move to Camperdown in the pipeline there have also been accusations that they scrimped on costs rather than spend what was necessary. 

Would getting rid of plastic stop the constant debates about surfaces or even stop some clubs funnelling money elsewhere? The SPFL have said a leading pitch consultancy firm, regularly used by Uefa, will come in to try and improve the standard of grass surfaces. But it still feels highly doubtful.

As for the aesthetic reasons previously mentioned, is that enough to increase the equality gap in Scottish football even further? This is a country where essentially every major trophy is won by two clubs, yet we constantly accommodate rule changes which favour them over smaller clubs: five substitutes, VAR and lengthy periods of stoppage time being three examples from recent seasons.

You never want a club to be denied promotion for something which isn't on sporting merit, but that is something we may see in the near future. Furthermore, there will be teams who come up with plastic, having to spend six figures installing grass, then immediately return back down to the lower leagues because their budget was so impacted by the changeover. This argument could again be dismissed, however, by pointing to the clubs who are willing to spend the money and therefore are at a sporting disadvantage compared with those who chose the cheaper option.

But synthetic surfaces capable of withstanding greater punishment than grass can be real positive for clubs away from just monetary value. As mentioned earlier, teams who play on plastic train on plastic. They also rent out the pitches, or even sometimes offer them up, for individuals and organisations within the local community. Children growing up in these areas can play on the exact same surface where they typically observe their heroes.

It helps to make a stadium the centre of the local community and that is undoubtedly a good thing for not only football in this country but society in general. (It's actually why Kilmarnock changed in the first place. They wanted to train in Kilmarnock having previously trained in Glasgow. The reason they're moving back to grass is that they're building a new training facility on the edge of town.) For the clubs big enough to make the top flight, do we want to remove so much of the relationship with the local community just because the discolouring of their pitch annoys us when they play in front of the Sky Sports cameras? 

There are plastic pitches out there which don't vex audiences as much. Airdrieonians are one example. It was commented on by many of my fellow Jambos when Hearts defeated the Diamonds in the Scottish Cup earlier this year that the pitch, one of a synthetic nature, looked like a bowling green. 

Some have offered as a potential compromise, instead of a blanket ban, why not allow them in the top flight if they meet a certain standard. But the problem with this solution is that any pitch which has appeared in the Premiership has already met specific standards, and fans are confusing how a pitch looks with how it plays. If a pitch is perfect in terms of how the ball rolls or bounces but looks dreadful to the naked eye, do you ban it? How do you even judge that?

A potential solution to all of this could to be allow the two-year grace period for any team coming up, not just until 2026. They get guaranteed Premiership money for two seasons in which to ease the transition. But then that wouldn't appease the masses, which is the main reason why this resolution is happening in the first place.

On the one hand, there should be a standard to meet for playing at the highest level, and having a grass surface doesn't feel like an unreasonable requirement. On the other, Scottish football should not be denying smaller clubs the ability to readdress the equality imbalance. There's no easy solution for this but it feels like more consultation should be done between clubs at the highest level and lower down the food chain to find a solution, rather than just banning plastic altogether.