KARL STANDLEY: If players enjoy playing on that piece of grass
out there and they feel that they can perform at the highest
level and when they do that and they score and they knee slide,
for me it wraps all as one. We've just made a moment.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Tonight the first whistle blows on the 2026
FIFA Men's World Cup. Around the world, flags are flying,
sweepstakes have been drawn and fans are gathering to watch the
game's greatest players battle it out on football's grandest
stage. But beneath every pass, tackle and goal lies something
we rarely think about. The pitch itself. That perfect grassy
green surface doesn't just host the game, it can shape how it's
played.
I'm Rosie Holdsworth, Ranger at the National Trust. Welcome to
Wild Tales and the story of what makes a pitch perfect.
Today we're at Wembley Stadium, the home of the England's men's
and women's national football teams, to meet Carl Stanley,
Wembley's Head Of Grounds and Surface Transitions.
KARL STANDLEY: In short terms, my job is to maintain and
deliver probably one of the world's most famous and iconic
pieces of grass, which is the hallowed turf of Wembley.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And Wembley's world-famous pitch has become
the example that the North American grounds teams are
striving to emulate for this year's World Cup.
KARL STANDLEY: The World Cup pitches, they've gone from what
are NFL surfaces, whether it is the guys who are in LA and
they're putting grass into a stadium that has a roof on it. I
mean, and Dallas Cowboys, the exact same. The stadiums are
being adapted like no one would believe. They're all being grown
off site.
The pitches, a lot of them are being raised up in the air,
again because they're on full construction so they're looking
at everything we have here at Wembley. They're looking at the
drainage, they're looking at the aeration system underneath it,
an in-situ irrigation system.
The American grounds industry is just pushing and striving
incredibly at the moment and we've had a fair few of them
come over and see, like how we're installing and working
with grass under sort of strict conditions.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Standing pitch side, the grass looks flawless,
lush and meticulously maintained. But there's quite a
complexity to football pitches that I didn't expect.
KARL STANDLEY: A lot of the Premier League teams and their
pitches are very much the same. A lot of them are injected with
artificial fibres. It's called a hybrid system. They're winter
sports pitches. So they're grown predominantly of sand.
If you don't have that stitch in the pitch, it would give way. So
imagine going to the beach and going at the top of the beach
where the wind's blowing and the sand is dry. It's loose
underfoot. That's why we have plastic fibre injected into
those pitches.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And Wembley is even more complex.
KARL STANDLEY: Now, this model at Wembley is a little bit
different. We have it in a carpet form, which means we can
go from concert to football in two and a half days. This is
English football at its best. And with that, Wembley plays a
huge part because when we have Taylor Swift, the profit that
this company makes goes back into grassroots.
If we have a stitched model, like I was mentioning a lot of
the Premier League have, you have to have a summer renovation
window where you take out the old pitch and then you refresh,
you replenish with sand, and then you put your seed in and
then you go, right, I've got the first game in six to seven
weeks.
So you grow it in. With Wembley. We have a lay and play system,
so our pitches are grown off-site at the turf farm. It's
a secret location away from here. These pitches are
harvested at the turf farm late at night, midnight, 1, 2 in the
morning, when it's the coolest and less stressful.
Concerts are in. They've killed all the pitch, the previous
pitch. The staging's gone out, the flooring's come off. That's
where then it goes into recycling. And then we have the
brand new pitch laid out over two days. Within the third day,
you could play football in it. No downtime.
There was a moment last year when we had our pitch coming out
down here and we had Oasis' stage still here, the cranes,
the arctic trucks, the thousands of tons of steel work still
being removed.
The following day the first lot of turf went down so 400 odd
rolls, second day 400 rolls, that evening we rolled it,
nutrients, started to prep it. The following day you could have
played football at a 7.30 kickoff and no one would have
known that four days ago you had Oasis in the building.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The logistical precision that's needed to
enable the stadium to flick between concerts and
championships is astounding and that precision runs through
every aspect of maintaining this iconic carpet of grass.
KARL STANDLEY: We've got equipment that we bring out, we
drop a Clegg hammer onto the pitch to see the hardness. So
again, what energy the player will bring back through their
body. We have instruments that are then tracking the rotational
resistance, so at what point would the pitch give way.
We'll take measurements. When we track all the areas that we're
testing, it's going straight onto an iPad. That will then
give us a heat map at the end of that test about everything think
about the playing surface.
So, for instance, the size of our stadium, we are six months
in shade. Grass needs sunlight to grow. So when the sun comes
over the stadium's roof around about March time, the north side
where we are now, by the players tunnel, is in natural light.
The rest of it's being grown artificially. The south side
will then start playing differently to the north side.
So again, these heat maps then almost track what we're doing
with the playing surface, but also what nature is allowing it
to do at its own rate as well.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: The condition of the playing surface can
fundamentally shape the way football is played. Grass
length, the consistency of the cut and levels of watering all
influence how the ball travels and how players move across the
pitch.
KARL STANDLEY: The condition that we like to deliver every
game at Wembley is slick and fast. So for FA Cup final, for
Champions League, for semi-finals, women's, men's,
internationals, 22 millimetres is normally what we'll play at.
You'll then see sprinklers on the pitch pop up when players
are arriving.
We'll normally do like a two millimetre drop of water to
slicken the leaf up and then we'll put another piece of water
on after warm-ups. So the players have played, shall we
say, or trained in a match condition at warm-ups. That
water sometimes evaporates so we add a little bit more water
after warm-ups. That will get us through the first half into
half-time.
More sprinklers go up and what we're doing is we're trying to
keep moisture retention there on the leaf. Think of it as
friction. When the ball is spinning, if the grass is longer
and it's dry, it will hold up in the grass ward. Whereas when we
add water to it, it reduces the traction and the friction and
actually makes the ball spin quicker.
We have millionaire players, in billionaire teams, playing on
that.
The fear and risk of injury is so high in these teams. So when
you look at the pitch, our objective as a ground team is to
allow the player to play at the best of their performance. They
don't walk onto the pitch, give it a kick and go, it's going to
be a tough game today.
It doesn't feel safe. So that's why the pitch is very important
that we always say, is it safe? Is it playable? Are the two
things we always have an objective for.
Is it stripy and green? Is the third. Aesthetics is very
important, of course. It's probably more important for
people watching it at home, for broadcast, for the brand as
Wembley stadium in the FA.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: But could the clubs be strategic with the
pitch maintenance to play to their team's strengths and
against their opponents?
KARL STANDLEY: Yes, you could have it longer. It could slow
the ball down. If you had a very quick moving team in your
stadium and you were the home team and you wanted to slow the
game down and cause them problems, yeah, you could do.
But the Premier League are very, very tight. Every pitch should
be consistent and also it's player safety. That's why we
take so much data.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So I really love grass. I'm a bit of a grass
nerd and many people don't realise that grass isn't just
grass. There's multiple different species. Some of the
things that look like grass aren't actually grass and some
of them have. really cool flowering plants hiding in there
as well.
And what's happening on the surface can tell you a lot about
what's going on in the soils and how healthy an ecosystem is. So
I'm really interested to know exactly what's happening under
our feet.
KARL STANDLEY: It's a European ryegrass, cold season grass. So
anything over six degrees, it will start to grow. Anything
under six degrees, it will stunt and slow.
But then with it, if we have any weather that's over, say, 30
degrees, high humidity, The energy in the plant, the cell
structure, everything with a piece of grass is natural. We'll
then start to go, this is too much for me, and then we start
having concerns with the pitch. It overwhelms it, shall we say.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Because the grass contains artificial fibres
woven into it, recycling the pitch is a complex challenge.
Wembley currently repurposes used pitches into merchandise
such as key rings and even furniture, including the bench
beside the players' tunnel. But their drive to innovate hasn't
stopped there.
KARL STANDLEY: Now the cool bit here is where we're down the
West End, this area here is new technology. It's the first part
which we understand to be in Europe. But the idea of this bit
is we can't really go into too much detail, but it's made of
certain ingredients. We'll allow it to biodegrade when we remove
it and over three years it will be a biodegradable material. So
this is a new trial we have here at Wembley.
From the white line onwards is our normal playing surface. So
when we talk about the grass, it has to be hard wearing because
players are going to warm up, slip, slide, move around.
They're going to leaf tear. The grass has to regenerate. It's
also this type of speck of grass because of the harvesting, the
install and the stresses that we put our pitch through before a
player has even played on it.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And what about those sliding players? After all
the work that goes into creating such an immaculate pitch, it
can't be easy to watch.
KARL STANDLEY: If players enjoy playing on that piece of grass
out there and they feel that they can perform at the highest
level and when they do that and they score and they knee slide,
for me it wraps all as one. We've just made a moment.
And Carvajal, who is a Real Madrid player, scored in the
recent Champions League final against Borussia Dortmund. And
he slid right in this corner in front of us. And there was a
nice slickness on the surface because we had watered the pitch
previously. And he slid for like 10 metres. Next thing you know,
all the players are now sliding in behind.
And for days, because he had slid so hard, he hadn't ripped
any of the grass. What he had done is he had pushed the grass
in, so it was like memory, like laying flat. So for like four
days after. There are these knee slides that we could not get rid
of. That's history.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: So knee slides are the least of Wembley's
worries. Another challenge though, one we're all
experiencing, is climate change.
High temperatures, torrential rain, cold snaps and heat waves.
Changing weather patterns are putting grass under increasing
pressure. So how is Wembley ensuring its world-famous pitch
can cope with the demands of a changing climate?
KARL STANDLEY: We feel it in the stadium because this is a giant
concrete bowl as well. In the summer, it's an oven. In the
winter, it's a freezer. The pitch, some days you can leave
it in the most pristine condition. You come in the
following day and you're like, what's happened overnight? A
drizzle in the stadium, 24 degrees. Right, that's going to
get the disease spores to then activate.
And then suddenly we get grass diseases, looking at fungicides,
looking at herbicides. Like, we're trying to come away from
that. And one thing with Wembley, we're trying to use
more sustainable methods and more cultural processes to then
eliminate any risk of disease. But that is also massively
linked to climate change.
So we're having to now use technology, which you would
weirdly find in a hospital, and a surgeon would use to then
cleanse the scalpels and the instruments they were to use for
surgery. So we're now looking at things like using UVC light to
then disperse the spores of disease on the pitch. So there's
quite some interesting links, but it all goes back to global
warming.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Wembley's innovation doesn't stop there.
Using UVC light to tackle grass disease is a remarkable example
of how technology is reshaping modern groundskeeping. So I
wanted to see some of the specialist equipment responsible
for keeping this iconic turf in perfect condition.
And where better to start than with robots?
KARL STANDLEY: So this is the robot. So this is working on the
pitch delivering ultraviolet light which then tries to
eradicate pathogens and disease. It uses the same technology as a
lidar which is a Tesla for instance, how they self-drive.
And then it will use that to then work itself up and down the
playing surface on a dot map. Its nickname is Betty.
This is a tractor rake and this is what we would then drag
across the pitch like you would a hand rake in your back garden
it then lifts up any organic any leaf material and they would
have small machines that go over and hoover up any of the organic
and leaf out and it just keeps the pitch as healthy as
possible.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Like most people my first impression of a
football pitch was the immaculate mowing patterns and I
soon discovered the mowers themselves were just as
impressive. In my role as a Ranger we have our own
specialist mowing equipment, but it's very, very different to
this. Ours is for managing habitats and reducing fire risk
on the moors. So it's a very different set of machinery, but
just as cool.
KARL STANDLEY: These mowers in front of you, yes, they are
elite mowers. And the blades on the front, they're an eight
blade cassette. And those blades are spinning at a ridiculous
amount of RPM. And when they go through the grass, you'll see
this machine in front of you. You've got like a roller with
grooves in, that brings the grass together. The bristles
behind then stand the leaf up because sometimes grass doesn't
always go straight up, it will go at an angle. It then grooms
the grass to then be cut by that red cassette. Think of it as a
scissor, the bottom blade and the cylinder connect and cut the
grass.
It then flips the grass through the cassette and then on the
front of here is normally a grass collector, a bucket should
we say. Now those blades have to be as sharp as possible. So if
we get a poor cut on the grass, it will recover poorly.
If we get a very sharp and clean cut, you've not ripped any of
the grass and that will allow better recovery and a healthier
grass plant. A healthier grass plant, potentially the more
games we can have, the more games we have, the more revenue
we make, the more we put back into grassroots. And it's just
keeping that natural grass as healthy as possible.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: As we headed back onto the pitch we could see
the grounds team looking very busy with what looked like a
heavy duty oversized lawnmower.
KARL STANDLEY: So what they're doing is they're aerating with
these giant great tines so when we're actually putting the holes
in the ground we were leaving the compaction but at the same
time we're allowing oxygen to get into the roots for the roots
to take the oxygen in. Where there is space grass will grow.
So you imagine a tine going through there these roots are
then going to find that space and they're going to grow into
those cracks that we've made. So again that's how we get our
roots to penetrate down past the carpet that's underneath this, a
small amount of carpet, into the sand so that's where they're
collecting all the nutrients.
Whereas a hybrid carpet system, when we harvest the pitch the
machine cuts the roots off, rolls it in a very flat roll,
all the work we've done for 16 weeks is just gone and then when
it comes into the stadium we then have to start again.
It's great because we also have a good canopy to work with,
which is the grass, and then we try and push those roots back
down, which is why we use the aeration systems like the
ProCores. We put millions of holes in the pitch.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Together, these elite tools help Carl and
his grounds team maintain Wembley's flawless, perfectly
striped pitch. It can feel almost clinical in its
precision, but nature rarely works that way. Spend some time
in a garden or a park, and it won't be long before wildlife
starts to emerge. Amid all this control and perfection has
wildlife still been able to flourish at Wembley?
KARL STANDLEY: You're not going to get anything like ants,
you're not going to get anything like worms, because you don't
have the organic content it's very very sand based because
it's a winter sports pitch. Some of the things we do get are from
very much above so you might have small little flies in there
the ladybugs they'll be attracted because of the flies.
We try and remove them off the pitch before we go and work Many
a time you'll see one of my grounds team pick one up and
just try to move it somewhere so it can enjoy its little life.
We do have crows in here. We have had kestrels up on the
roof. We have had some birds of prey. We also have pigeons. The
crows don't like the pigeons. The pigeons don't like the
crows. The ladybugs don't like the crows. We've had a few
kestrels have a go at a few crows and they've had a go back.
So it does have its nice little ecology as well that we have.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: And with that, it's time for me to swap the
city for the wild comfort of the Pennines, carrying with me a new
appreciation of the grass beneath the game and the people
who work tirelessly to maintain it.
And as the World Cup takes over our screens, our conversations
and our dreams, the question remains, just how prepared will
England be?
KARL STANDLEY: England trained here, so pretty much this pitch,
and the pitches at Tottenham where they were training, and St
George's Park where they started their training camp, all of
those pitches were the same as what will be delivered at a
World Cup.
Yes, the grass is different, but with England, we've given them
everything we can as Wembley to give everything England need
from a pitch performance. They've got games and friendlies
in Tampa, getting used to the climate, getting used to the
pitch conditions. They'll be training on warm season grasses.
These players also, they play everywhere. They can be playing
at the Santiago Bernabeu. The following week they could be
playing a Champions League game in Latvia. They could even be
going into Sweden playing on artificial pitches. So when you
look at a player, they are very adaptable and we hope they can
bring it home.
It's an absolute honour and a pleasure to be around both of
our men's and our women's team because they're such incredible
teams. The technical teams, the management teams, the players
themselves. It's great to see English football thriving. So,
yeah, fingers crossed, men's and women's, they can bring more
silverware and goldware back to Wembley Stadium.
ROSIE HOLDSWORTH: Thanks for listening to this episode of
Wild Tales with me, Rosie Holdsworth. Why not follow us on
Instagram at wildtalesnt and let us know who you're supporting in
the World Cup or what your favourite type of grass is. See
you soon.