So I was watching some footage of premiership football from the 90s and the pitches were muddy and the players were muddy when getting up after tackling etc.
You watch professional football from decades earlier and the are even more muddy.
Now if you stick a match on, after an unbelievable wet winter and spring, the pitches at St James’s, Anfield, old Trafford are immaculate and the players walk off looking like they don’t even need to wash thier kits.
What’s changed?
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I was watching a baseball game the other day and it had been a massively rainy patch of weather in the northeast . They said the outfield grass was pretty much perfectly dry as a result of the the drainage/vacuum system that sucks all the water down and then also has a heated blower system that then dries the ground as well. They showed the machinery, it’s pretty massive and I have no idea where it’s located…I mean I have to assume underground near the outfield. You’d never know though…there’s no visible signs of this being there.
As a matter of fact, a Turkish football team, Galatasaray, complained to the Turkish Football Federation (TFF) a few months ago, stating that one of the other teams’ stadium’s soil was too hard for playing, and told that they didn’t want to play in that tough and muddy ground.
TFF, denied the request.
In some stadiums, they even regrade and re-seed between games. They roll out these UV lights to make the grass grow quicker
[like this](https://images.app.goo.gl/kYBjox8sAZD9gYD27)
I would imagine that football clubs have spent a lot of money to investigate how to keep the fields from becoming muddy. To keep the game flowing and to prevent injuries. Here’s an example of Real Madrids home stadium. ( I could imagine it makes it easier to host other events as well)
Desso pitches cost about a million and it’s a hybrid of real and fake grass. Completely different to astro/4g pitches
Even before they became the go to drainage and technology like grow lights etc helped.
Lots of comments have covered the answers but there is a great informative video by Tifo Football on the subject that is worth a watch. Drainage, stitching artificial material to create a stronger pitch, and immaculate care.
I the US you can get a 4 year degree in this. It’s called turf science and it is an extension of agriculture.
Golf courses, football fields, all hire turf managers.
Technology. The pitches are built on foundations that are designed to drain really quickly. So even when it rains, the water doesn’t pool up because it drains right through the soil.
> “They had an injury list the length of your arm,” he recalled. A more stable pitch would start to solve that problem. But there was a more tactical reason for signing Calderwood: before his arrival, the pitch was too slow, too bobbly, too unpredictable for the kind of high-tempo passing game played by most of Europe’s elite teams. “The owners realised that it wasn’t about buying 11 world-class players,” said Calderwood. “They needed things behind them to allow them to work. One of the main things was the pitch.”
Pitches like the muddy ones were terrible for the game.
[‘The Silicon Valley of turf’: how the UK’s pursuit of the perfect pitch changed football](https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/jun/15/silicon-valley-of-turf-uk-perfect-football-pitch)
I recommend the tour at St James’, they explain how they maintain it, esp without a lot of sunny days to help it grow.
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