Why QPR once had English football’s weirdest home advantage | OneFootball

The installation of a new pitch at Loftus Road pushed QPR into the headlines, but not always for the reasons that the London club might have wanted.

Queens Park Rangers gave themselves a home advantage in the early 1980s which caused huge controversy at the time, was banned by UEFA, and ended up being prohibited across both the Football League and the Premier League.

As has been clearly seen by the Spygate drama which overshadowed the end of the 2025-26 Championship season, marginal gains can mean a lot in professional football. Many of the rules which regulate the game have been written to address the question of where the line is to be drawn between a perfectly reasonable advantage and an unfair one.

In 1981, Queens Park Rangers courted huge controversy by making a change to their Loftus Road stadium which had the potential to change the very way the game was played, and although their decision to install an artificial playing surface at Loftus Road turned out to be the start of something of a fad, the arguments over whether football should only be played on natural grass surfaces rumbles on to this day.

The modern artificial playing surface came about as a result of a miscalculation

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The invention of modern artificial playing surfaces came about as a result of a miscalculation. In 1965, the Houston Astros baseball team moved into the Astrodome, the first multipurpose indoor stadium in the world. Because of the extent of heat in Texas, it was considered that the team needed an indoor stadium. Indeed, their Major League Baseball franchise had been given to them on condition of them building an indoor stadium.

But by the end of their first season, it was clear that there was a problem. The stadium's glass domed roof amplified the glare of the sun to be so bright that the glass skylight panels had to be painted white to reflect the light, and this resulted in its natural grass playing surface not growing properly.

Fortunately for the Astros, their owner, Roy Hofheinz, was an executive with the chemical company Monsanto, who had been working on an artificial playing surface called ChemGrass for a couple of years. Hofheinz had one of these new pitches installed at the Astrodome in 1966, rebranded ChemGrass as AstroTurf, and it worked. By the end of the 1960s, there were 27 AstroTurf pitches installed across the USA.

At the same time that the AstroTurf pitch was installed in Houston, across the ocean in London, Queens Park Rangers had just been promoted and had engaged with the architect Michael Newberry to redevelop Loftus Road. The club had long had a fractious relationship with their home for a long time, and even moved away in 1931 and 1962 had even tried moving away to play their home matches at the nearby White City Stadium. By the early 1960s, it was in a state of something approaching disrepair.

Newberry's plan for Loftus Road was revolutionary, to build four stands which would complement each other, leading to a unified stadium brought together under one design. Between 1968 and 1981 Loftus Road was completely redeveloped, building one stand at a time, but the club weren't finished yet. In the summer of 1981 came arguably the biggest and most controversial change of all.

Artificial pitches were viewed with suspicion from the moment they were introduced

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By the end of the 1970s, AstroTurf was largely considered obsolete, though other technologies had come along to replace it. And Queens Park Rangers had endured issues with their pitch for a long time. The location of Loftus Road in the middle of a residential area meant that expanding upwards was their only option, and the lack of sunshine on the pitch took a toll.

After a fact-finding trip to the USA by the QPR chairman Jim Gregory and Chief Executive Ian Simpson in 1980, the pitch that they decided on was made using a system called Omniturf, which consisted of an artificial grass made from polypropylene fibre with a layer of sand underneath it. It was installed at a cost of £350,000 in the summer of 1981.

The Football League had their doubts, and initially only approved the pitch for a trial run of three years, although this was extended upon its completion. But while the roll of the ball was very true, the bounce was a major issue, and within weeks there was a media debate raging over whether they were suitable for use for football or not. Players were reporting burns from sliding tackles on them, and goalkeepers had to wear tracksuit trousers.

But there were clear benefits to Queens Park Rangers, even discounting the possibility that they were gaining an advantage by having one. The new pitch was resilient enough for the club to be able to hire it out whenever they wanted, and it was hoped that it would end up paying for itself. Ironically, they lost their first home league match on it, 2-1 at home to Luton Town.

The club also saw a clear benefit over the winter of the 1981-82 season - the worst in Britain in almost two decades - in not having matches called off while others around them fell like flies. By the end of the season, Rangers had finished 5th in the Second Division and reached the FA Cup final, only losing to Spurs after a replay. The following season, they were promoted back to the First Division.

A return to the top-flight only increased scrutiny of this strange new pitch. QPR allowed other clubs to train on it in advance of matches, but the nature of the pitch meant that it often needed to be watered the night before, meaning that it sometimes played slightly differently on matchdays to even practice sessions held on it less than 24 hours earlier.

And after one season back in the First Division, they faced another regulatory issue. QPR finished their first season back in the top-flight by finishing 5th, and this qualified them for the UEFA Cup, but UEFA were unhappy with the pitch at Loftus Road and banned them from using it. In the First Round of that competition, they were drawn to play Iceland's KR Reykjavik and won the first leg 3-0 away, meaning that QPR's home European debut came at Highbury, in front of just below 6,200 people. The match ended in a 4-0 win and 7-0 on aggregate.

A Second Round draw against Partizan Belgrade didn't raise a great deal more interest and just 7,000 made the trek back across London for the first leg in October 1984. Those that made the journey were well-rewarded, though. Rangers won the match 6-2, a result well surpassing the pre-match hopes of manager Alan Mullery, who’d told reporters before the match that he'd be happy with a two-goal win.

In the second leg, however, the team received a rude awakening. Partizan raced to a 4-0 lead after just 64 minutes, and QPR couldn't find a way back. They were knocked out on away goals after a 6-6 aggregate draw. This extraordinary tie remains the club's last in European football.

By the middle of the decade, other clubs were taking notice. Artificial playing surfaces were also installed at Luton Town, Oldham Athletic and Preston North End. But resistance to them was growing, and in May 1985 the FA banned the use of any pitch installed after 1985 in the FA Cup. This ban was reversed in October 1986, but by this time the writing was on the wall and at the end of the 1987-88 season, QPR ripped it out and re-installed a grass pitch. Artificial pitches were eventually banned in 1995. By this time, only Preston North End's remained.

More than thirty years on, artificial playing surfaces remain banned in the Premier League and the EFL, although UEFA long ago ended their objections to them as a result of newer technology pitches. Back in England, they're extremely commonplace in the non-league game, but this can carry a cost for promoted clubs. When Sutton United were promoted into the EFL in 2021, it was reported to cost them £500,000 to get their artificial pitch replaced with a grass one.

The question of whether Queens Park Rangers gained an unfair advantage as a result of having their Omniturf pitch is a highly subjective one. On one hand, over the seven seasons that they had it, the club reached the finals of both the FA Cup and the League Cup, returned to the First Division and established themselves there, and qualified for European football for only the second - and to date last - time in their history.

Yet the extent to which any advantage they had was "unfair" was debatable. Certainly, their home form wasn't that different to anybody else's - they didn't have an unbeaten season at home over the seven for which they used it - and there's a case for saying that their own players, who will have played the majority of their careers on grass, had to adjust as much as their opponents.

And the early 1980s were a very different financial era for clubs. Crowds had been falling since the 1950s, and the rise of hooliganism from the early 1970s only accelerated that decline. By the time that QPR installed theirs, there were genuine concerns about whether professional football could even survive with 92 professional clubs. Anything that gave clubs the opportunity to increase revenues had to be looked at very closely. This was also the era that brought the growth of shirt sponsorship and the introduction of live League football.

In the end, concerns about player welfare trumped everything else. The PFA identified increased fatigue, the increased likelihood of injury and the subsequent shortening of careers, and the more direct style of football that artificial surfaces are perceived to promote, as the biggest issues with these pitches.

The Queens Park Rangers of the early 1980s were the disruptors of their era. The thirteen-year plan to redevelop Loftus Road was a spectacular success. The ground is showing its age a little nowadays, but the design has held for more than 40 years. And while their artificial pitch may have been a step too far, there's also a case for saying that it was decades ahead of its time.