Depending on the time of year, they looked like mud puddles, skating rinks, or dust bowls. But as the big bucks are pouring into football, pristine pitches have become critical to the sport’s image – Star Gardeners
Real Madrid’s poaching of Paul Burgess from Arsenal in 2009 was a landmark moment for the English football genius. After starting his career at Blackpool Football Club, Burgess moved to the north London club in 1999, making his mark at the age of 21. He distinguished himself on the European stage during Arsenal’s Champions League campaign in the early 2000s and scored at Euro 2004 in Portugal. Four years later, he again distinguished himself at the European Championships. Shortly thereafter, the sensational transfer was made by the most prestigious club in world football, Real Madrid.
If you don’t remember it, it wasn’t because Burgess failed in Madrid. This is because he is Arsenal’s chief caretaker. Burgess’s move was the start of a run of British talent across Europe. Atlético’s real rivals turned on Dan Gonzalez, who was impressed with his work at Bournemouth. Tony Stones, who began tending the bowling greens at Barnsley and later became Chief Grounds Keeper at Wembley, was signed on to oversee the Stade de France, France’s national stadium. Meanwhile, FIFA signed Alan Ferguson, the Scot who won seven Stadium Man of the Year awards in 12 seasons at Ipswich Town, as their first senior inside pitching manager.
The most notable signing was Jonathan Calderwood, who joined Paris Saint-Germain from Aston Villa in 2013. The Northern Irishman has won the stadium’s Player of the Year twice, and Gerard Houllier, manager of Liverpool and Lyon, named him the best player in the world. and villas. The move comes as Paris Saint-Germain’s new Qatari boss is investing hundreds of millions of dollars to bring in the world’s best players, including Zlatan Ibrahimovic and David Beckham. During our recent conversation, Calderwood said that the moment of his move was not accidental.
“They had a list of injuries at arm’s length,” he recalled. A more stable feed will start to correct this. But there was also a more tactical reason for Calderwood’s signing: before he arrived, the field was too slow, too wobbly, too unpredictable, and to talk about the kind of fast passing that most of Europe’s elite teams play. “The owners realized that this was not about buying 11 world-class players,” Calderwood said. “They need something behind them to make them work. One of the main things is the field.”
Since his arrival, Paris Saint-Germain have won six Ligue 1 titles in eight seasons and, last but not least, in Calderwood’s view, he has also been the Ligue 1 Player of the Year six times. Best Stadium award. After winning the league in 2014, then-manager Laurent Blanc attributed the club’s 16 points to Calderwood as the pitch allowed the team to build up an attack. The club featured it on billboards and appeared in commercials on national television. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, once the club’s star striker, jokingly complained that Calderwood received more media attention than he did.
The UK is a unique talent factory when it comes to sports field management. “We are 10 years ahead of any other place in the world,” Richard Hayden, author of FIFA’s Official Stadium Handbook, told me. “If you want to work in technology, you can go to Silicon Valley. Well, the UK is the real Silicon Valley!”
The UK land administration sector alone is worth over £1bn, employs over 27,000 people and has experts in every field, from seed hobbyists who can grow herbs that grow in the shade to scientists who develop chemical substances to make the grass greener. In West Yorkshire, the Sports Turf Research Institute is an R&D powerhouse, studying everything from how quickly water passes through different types of sand to how the fineness of a stem of grass influences the roll of a golf ball. In West Yorkshire, the Sports Turf Research Institute is an R&D powerhouse, studying everything from how quickly water passes through different types of sand to how the fineness of a stem of grass influences the roll of a golf ball. In West Yorkshire, the Sports Turf Research Institute is a research and development center that studies everything from how quickly water travels through different types of sand to how the size of a stalk of grass affects the spin of a golf ball. In West Yorkshire, the Sports Turf Institute is a research and development center that studies everything from the speed of water through different types of sand to how the thinness of grass stalks affects the spin of a golf ball. In terms of hardware, the UK also has no competition. Bernhard in Warwickshire makes some of the best mower sharpening systems in the world, Allett in Staffordshire supplies top-notch mowing and maintenance equipment, as does Dennis in Derbyshire. Dennis lawnmowers are used from Wimbledon to Camp Nou in Barcelona and Old Trafford in Manchester United. Calderwood also uses them at PSG.
Lawn care practices developed in the UK have been used in tennis, golf, rugby and virtually every professional sport played on grass. But it was football, with its vast wealth and global fan base, that led to this revolution. No gardener would ever claim that his work is the main reason for any team’s success, but just as Olympic swimmers don’t compete in beach shorts and professional cyclists shave their legs, the best football teams are obsessed with the smallest details that can make the difference. between victory or victory. lose. When Guardiola arrived at City in 2016, he demanded that the grass be cut to just 19mm, as was the case with previous clubs Barcelona and Bayern. (He eventually had to opt for 23mm as the short grass was more prone to wear and Manchester’s cold climate meant it could not recover quickly.) Similarly, after the 2016/17 season, Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp told stadium management Man: The pitch at Anfield is too slow. Staff rebuilt the stadium over the summer and Liverpool are unbeaten at home in the league for the entire next season.
Since the early 1990s, huge improvements to the playing field have changed the way the game is played. “At Arsenal we always have a first-class stadium, but in away games it just keeps getting better and better,” former manager Arsene Wenger told me via email. “It helps a lot to improve the quality of the game, especially the speed of the game.”
The quality of the field is especially important for the best clubs who want to maximize the talents of their technically gifted players. In contrast, a bad serve is treated as a draw because it prevents the better team from passing quickly; so to speak, in football, an uneven playing field tends to level the playing field.
The European Championship this summer will be held in 11 cities on the continent, but the fields are mostly in the hands of the British. UEFA has appointed a “Field Expert” at each stadium who will work with local gardeners to ensure match quality pitches. With the exception of Irishmen Richard Hayden and Greg Whately, all serving experts are from England. At Wembley Stadium, home of the semi-final and final, the serving experts are Dale Fries and groundskeeper Carl Standley, a 36-year-old Brit with a razor-cut haircut and white stubble, whose awards include Top turf Influencer Awards.
Four weeks before England’s first match against Croatia at Wembley, Standley sounded focused but relaxed, like a star student well-prepared for exams. Yes, his work at the European Championships will be seen by more than a billion viewers around the world, and yes, the stars of the tournament rely on him for their best work, but he is not intimidated. “We’ve been planning this game for years,” Standley told me recently. “We plan to try to be indestructible.”
Pitch in English has long been tired. When it rains, they turn into a quagmire. During the cold winter months, the bog turns to ice. Then, a few months later, warm weather turns them into dry, dusty plains. “People like to come to Wembley because it’s probably the only grass field in England,” Calderwood said.
Bad fields mean games cancelled, meaning loss of revenue, which has led some clubs to turn to synthetic alternatives. In 1981, Queens Park Rangers installed the OmniTurf. A thin layer of artificial turf had been laid on the tarmac, and the new surface was so hard that former Oldham Athletic manager Joe Royle recalls at one point a goal kick bounced so high it simply went over the opposite beam. But QPR are starting to win in their new territory and a number of other clubs have followed suit. The FA banned them in 1995 due to a riot in which so-called “plastic fields” gave hosts an unfair advantage. But at this point, a new chapter in site management began.
Like most modern football stories, the rise of elite turf care is a story about money and television. In the 1990s, as TV revenues flooded into the new Premier League, clubs began to spend more on transfer fees and player salaries. The more valuable players become, the more important it is to protect them from harm. One way to reduce injuries is to provide a quality playing field. As a result, the long-forgotten gardener took on a new meaning. “Suddenly there is more pressure on the janitors,” said Nice goalkeeper Scott Brooks, who has worked at Arsenal and Tottenham.
It is not only about protecting the players, but also about the viewers. If the Premier League wants to establish itself as a beautiful global brand, it needs a product that will look good on TV. Dirty, changeable, incomplete course is unacceptable. According to Calderwood, broadcasters are starting to demand “pool-like venues.” Some broadcasters even stipulate in their contracts that the field must be in pristine condition, according to Geoff Webb, chief executive of the Territory Management Association, which represents the interests of British gardeners.
As the course improved, so did the game itself. “Days and nights from where we are at Old Trafford,” Sir Alex Ferguson, who coached Manchester United from 1986 to 2013, told me via email. “Knowing that you have consistent, high-quality coverage, especially when you need to move the ball at a certain speed, goes a long way.”
At the heart of this revolution in lawn care is Steve Braddock. Braddock has done more than anyone since joining Arsenal in 1987 to create a world where the perfect serve is the norm. Wenger cited meeting Braddock as one of his biggest hits. “I finally found someone with the same passion for the perfect serve,” Wenger told me. According to him, Braddock is the key to raising the bar in the Premier League.
On a windy spring morning, Braddock picked me up at Radley station in Hertfordshire and we drove down winding back roads to Arsenal’s training ground in Kearney, where he pitched 11 pitches. This is his first week back to work in more than a year as he battles the pandemic while undergoing treatment for skin cancer.
Upon arrival, he showed me around, stopping at one point to call his trusted design engineer to tell him that the fan belts on one of his tractors needed to be tightened – he heard a squeak about 50 meters away – - Another complained about a gardener’s assistant who moved the gate posts without lifting the wheels. “It leaves marks,” he explained. Braddock’s attention to detail is legendary: a former assistant told me that if he could, he would mow the grass with scissors.
Braddock was only 23 years old when he joined Arsenal as a field manager. In the early days, faced with a limited budget and what he saw as a culture of low standards, he had to find his own way. On top of all this, there is an annual revamp: at the end of each season, the field is pulled up to remove unwanted weeds that have shallow roots and don’t hold the turf in place, making it more prone to breakage. Prior to improved technology in 2000, this required several weeks of walking up and down the track using machines called scarifiers.
Over time, other British pitchers adopted Braddock’s methods, including his liberal use of sand to help the pitch drain more quickly. “Steve changed the industry,” current Arsenal stadium manager Paul Ashcroft told me. Braddock’s repair technology “was never considered or considered feasible with the limited equipment available.” Braddock is also happy to share his accumulated wisdom with other clubs. Several gardeners I spoke to recalled turning to Braddock for repair advice.
Gradually, the role of the gardener began to change. Since the late 1990s, when the Premier League required them to be trained in plant sciences, the job has become increasingly data-driven. New technologies help too. A lawn mower at a stadium like Wembley might run 25-30 hours a week, 50 weeks a year. Standley told me that the lawn mower had to travel 10 miles to pass Wembley once. Prices for these machines start at £11,000. When I visited Dennis’ factory in Derbyshire in April, they were assembling 12 lawnmowers for shipment to Qatar, which FIFA had ordered for next year’s World Cup.
For British lawn care professionals, European standards are still pathetic. “They just didn’t understand what it took to play professional football,” Stones said, recalling his time at the Stade de France as head coach. Calderwood thinks it depends on education. Like many leading lawn care professionals, he studied lawn science at Miles Coe College in Preston. “Even to get something like a diploma or an advanced national diploma, which is not possible in France, there is no such thing,” he said.
When he arrived in Paris Saint-Germain, Calderwood was shocked by what he found. Field teams don’t even have the rotary mowers needed to clean up dead grass after games. “They don’t even know something as simple as that,” he told me, as shocked as someone who has just discovered that his neighbor doesn’t understand that he has to mow the lawn. When I spoke to Calderwood’s deputy, a Frenchman named Arnaud Meline, he told me that the “vision” of grass in his home country is fundamentally different. For the French, it’s still “the place to go to a barbecue with friends.”
Preparations for Euro 2020 began more than two years ago. In the early hours of April 25, 2019, Dale Frith was driving down the M6 to Wembley, where UEFA was gathering its team of field experts for a “kick-off” meeting.
By 10 am, many lawn care giants are at the negotiating table. In addition to Fries, there is also Richard Hayden, who claims to be the only turf specialist to successfully change fields in Lille during Euro 2016. Dean Gilasby has worked with FIFA to develop aspiring goalkeepers around the world, from Macedonia to Ghana. Andy Cole is the longest-serving court expert in this room, having played at three European Championships and three World Championships. These people are not gardeners, they are lawn consultants, agronomists and oversee several ongoing projects.
UEFA representatives presented the schedule for the coming months, as well as their expectations from each stadium. According to UEFA guidelines, grip must be above 30 newton meters (Nm), which is a unit of torque that measures a player’s interaction with the surface. Too much traction can damage the ligaments and lead to injury, too little can cause the player to lose balance. The surface hardness should be between 70 and 90 gravimetric – this is a measure of how quickly the hammer slows down on impact. If the ball is too soft, the player will tire quickly, if it is too hard, the risk of injury will increase and the ball will bounce too high. The turf must be between 24mm and 28mm and must be cut in a straight line across the field and perpendicular to the touchline. It even lists the size of the penalty point and center point (200mm and 240mm in diameter, respectively).
As a consultant, Fries will support UEFA by monitoring pitch data from janitor Standley and occasionally conducting independent tests. The relationship between gardeners and consultants is not easy. Gardeners are responsible for the day-to-day maintenance of specific sites, while consultants roam between projects, from the World Cup to mass sports. (During the Wembley visit, Frith was working at St. Helens Primary School, which had a poorly drained sports field.) Some have compared the relationship between a builder and an architect. “I know what I want, but skilled workers will do what I want,” Andy Cole told me. For a modern British gardener trained in horticulture, this attitude can be unpleasant. Standley, who has won numerous awards in his 15 years as a gardener at Wembley Stadium and is passionate about his work, initially declined to be interviewed for this article because he feared it would overemphasize the work of turf consultants.
Standley compared his job to flying an airplane. He hopes he can land softly on matchdays with proper preparation, but when games are back-to-back, he stays overnight at a nearby hotel in case something unexpected happens. He is often away from his family, including most of the weekends, but it’s a sacrifice he’s willing to make. “This is not my job, this is a passion,” he said. He named Wembley Stadium his second child because he “lives and breathes as one”. (Gardeners usually say this when they mean when the field is “thirsty” or “hungry.”)
Excellent maintenance in the field depends on achieving near-total control over every component of the field. In May, I visited Dave Roberts, Liverpool’s senior stadium manager, at Anfield and he showed me how he uses heat and moisture sensors in the soil to create the best conditions for grass and uses zeolite (a type of volcanic ash, soil) magnets retain moisture in the root area. Anfield’s “permanent” irrigation system is a series of plastic boxes that connect under a network of heated pipes to speed up drainage and allow it to water the entire surface in less than three minutes.
Plentiful rainfall and moderate temperatures make the UK a great place to grow grass. But even in this pleasant greenery, the weather is still the ground crew’s worst enemy. They live in fear of the unexpected. A week after my first visit to Wembley, the final non-league day took place. The night before, 6 mm of rain fell instead of the predicted 2 mm, which caused panic among the Standley team.
When I ask Standley what scares him, he recalls the snowstorm that hit just hours before Tottenham’s 2018 FA Cup replay against Rochdale at Wembley. (Later in the game, the ground crew had to come to the area with shovels to clear the penalty area.) “Nature is the biggest problem,” Standley told me. Although Frith began his career as a gardener, he turned to a consultant in 2008, in part because “lack of control” made him anxious.
Work may have a price. Like goalkeepers, gardeners tend not to get much recognition when things are going well, but if things go wrong, they are the first to be blamed. For the Stones, it’s a lifestyle, not a job. “You don’t become a gardener, you are born a gardener,” he said.
If you are looking for a world-class sports venue, Wembley Stadium would be a poor choice. Standley likens his job to growing weed in a shoebox. From September to March, 50-meter stands cast shadows on the lawn. During these months, stadium light levels rarely exceed 12 µmol, well below the 20 µmol normally needed for grass to grow. Wembley also had poor airflow, Standley said. As lawn experts say, without wind, the grass becomes “lazy” and eventually falls and dies.
Standley has some really great tools for solving these problems. It uses an underground aeration system to raise the moisture and oxygen levels in the sand and composites up to 30 centimeters below the surface (called the “root zone”). To stimulate grass seedling growth, it also delivers hot water through underground pipes, raising the temperature in the upper root zone to 17°C. As soon as the seeds germinate, he turns on the lights and six huge fans to simulate summer conditions. What looks like an ordinary piece of grass is actually a “giant chemical combination,” he told me.
To keep Wembley Stadium in top shape during the summer, major work needs to be completed during the winter. On November 20, 2019, in preparation for the European Championship, it was time to start the reconstruction of the stadium – to replace the first root zone weighing 6,000 tons. London’s natural soil contains a lot of clay, which means it doesn’t drain well, so Standley brought sand from Surrey to speed up the drainage. Field reconstruction is a complex task that must be completed every eight years. A team of 15 workers, working 24 hours a day for three weeks, saves time and money by getting materials to and from the stadium at night when there is less traffic.
Grass takes about 11 weeks to mature after new sod is laid. (This also included weaving a small patch of artificial grass into the surface to stabilize it.) Then, in March 2020, UEFA moved the European Championship to the following summer. This was a disappointment for Standley, but not a disaster. In November 2020, he repaired the pitch and began testing, sending the results to Frith for interpretation on UEFA’s behalf. From February 2021, Frith will travel to London for his own testing.
Standley adapts Wembley perfectly to other sports such as rugby and American football. The latter, he says, has a short playing time and needs “maximum traction”. In order to force players to change direction as quickly as possible, the NFL requires firm fields with gravity between 90 and 100. To increase the stiffness of the field, the Standley team will weigh their lawn mowers by about 30 kg. Standley can add approximately one unit of weight per cut. To relieve the pressure again, he will turn to the Verti-Drain, a tool made up of six spikes that dig into the ground to relieve tension by breaking up the soil. To provide extra protection for American football players when they fall, Standley makes the grass slightly longer, up to about 32mm.
Breeders have created thousands of different varieties to provide the perfect grass for every sport. They sometimes take up to 15 years to develop a new variety, and their strongest batches end up on the table of Dr. Christian Spring at the West Yorkshire Sports Turf Institute. STRI rates grass for qualities such as “shoot density” (the thickness of the turf) and “recovery” (how quickly it recovers from wear). STRI carefully evaluates each breed and publishes its findings in an annual booklet that Standley calls his bible.
However, you cannot turn Wembley into a cricket or grass tennis court. The soil is too sandy, so the surface will never be hard enough. On an overcast afternoon, I headed south London, where Neil Stubly, director of turf and horticulture for the All England Lawn Tennis Club, was preparing for Wimbledon. When the first ball hits at the end of June, Wimbledon will be twice as strong as Wembley was when the NFL went to town.
Like Calderwood, Stubley went to Myerscoe College, where he was taught that plants should always be healthy, well watered, and well nourished. “Then you start playing tennis, roll out the begizus, stop feeding it, stop watering it,” he told me. To create the best grass field, Stubly had to strike a balance between life and death. “When you start a tournament, the plants slowly die because you are starving,” he said. But the surface should not be too dry at first, “otherwise the plant will die by the second week.” Kort finished the two-week race with about 300 g, which is not much better than asphalt.
When I first visited Standley at Wembley on 12 May – four weeks before the European Championship and three days before the FA Cup final – all but a handful of broadcasters and the Standley Five, not counting the ground staff, the stadium was empty. With the cup final approaching, the length of the field has reached the playing length: 24 mm. Between races, Standley let the grass grow as much as possible. His team then trimmed it about 2mm a day for a week. (Heavier cuts can shock the plants and turn them yellow.) Four days before start, they will mow to keep the same length, cutting only a small section each day. This constant beveling emphasizes the pattern on the field, making it look like a green chessboard.
Later that morning, I tested the course with Fries. Armed with a variety of equipment, many looking like futuristic torture instruments, Frith littered the Wembley lawns, careful not to mow one of the eerily quiet electric lawnmowers. As expected, the course is in good shape. Later that week, he uploaded the score to the UEFA Bosses Portal.
It wasn’t until I returned two weeks later, on the day of the championship playoff final, that I realized the importance of Standley’s work. When I arrived about an hour before kick-off, Standley was visibly flustered and his hair was tousled, a departure from his usual flawless appearance. With the winner promoted to the Premier League, the highest-grossing game in English football, it marked the start of the toughest weekend of the Standley calendar, with three straight matches played from Saturday to Monday. After that, he will have two weeks to make final adjustments before England’s first game in the European Cup.
At 2:00 pm, Standley had a meeting with the ground team before heading to the stadium to watch the game. “Despite the fact that we read all the data, I need to see the evidence now,” he told me. Standley watches football like a production designer watches a movie: what is only a background for others, in fact, he focuses on himself.
“I don’t look at the players, I watch their boots touch the ground,” he said. He will take care of the miss, just as the average fan might be afraid to see his defender refuse a penalty. The equivalent of his team’s scoring is watching a player in a spin, turn or turn, which can only be done on a perfectly groomed pitch. Standley was pleased when Phil Foden made a stunning shot on the south sideline late in Wembley’s match against Iceland in November. “He relies on a stable court,” Standley said with a laugh.
Only after the game was Standley able to take a breath. After the tournament playoff final, he went to the office to relax and listen to music. He loved listening to the artists he met at Wembley: Coldplay, Adele, Springsteen. Within 24 hours, he needs to do it again, and then again the next day. As he makes his way to the hotel, he allows himself to think of the euro. On Tuesday, June 1, the entire stadium will be transformed so that the Euro 2020 logo appears in the stands. “It took us three years to get here,” Standley said. “We’ve been preparing for this, we want a soft landing.”
It was 6 am when Standley arrived to watch England’s first game on Sunday 13 June, but it was already warm. He followed the same procedure as usual, starting with walking around the playing field. It calmed his nerves and made him feel the surface. The forecast called for high temperatures, so Standley knew that watering the track was paramount, especially on the north side, which is completely exposed to the sun. After Standley finished his inspection, his team cut him horizontally twice to make the pattern that appeared on the field clearer, and repainted the white line twice. At noon, two hours before the start of the match, the field was watered for the second time.
Post time: Sep-23-2022