Ground force: Winning the battle against the Great British weather

Think you have had enough of the rain? 

Spare a thought for the nation’s groundstaff, writes Rory Smith

Rory Smith

22 feb 2026 - THE OBSERVER / Sport

As a guide to just how bleak this winter has been, it is pretty hard to beat. Craig Knight remembers it distinctly: he was sitting in Everton’s Hill Dickinson Stadium, watching England’s rugby league international with Australia, when he looked towards the ground’s North Stand. The corner flag was dappled with sunshine. That was 1 November last year.

This week, one of Knight’s colleagues on Everton’s groundstaff messaged him excitedly. “Pop your champagne cork,” the caption read. Attached was a picture of the stadium, a shaft of bright sunshine illuminating a section of the grass. Knight felt a wave of relief. It was the first direct sunlight on the pitch in almost four months.

Even by Great Britain’s extremely low standards, the weather in 2026 so far has been – and this is the meteorological term – dreadful. Until this week, it had rained somewhere in the country every single day. Or, more accurately: in most of the country, it feels like it has basically been raining all the time since Christmas.

Parts of Devon and Cornwall have had rain for 40 days, wet enough that animals might start pairing up and queuing. At one point, it was breathlessly reported that Aberdeen had not seen the sun for 21 days straight. Aberdeen should not make the mistake of thinking it is special; it’s not exactly been T-shirt weather anywhere else. It has not even had the decency to snow properly.

***

We have all had a tough winter. But it is possible Knight, and his colleagues and peers, have felt it more keenly than most: for the past few months, the groundskeepers of the Premier League have been tasked with creating picture-perfect pitches in conditions that fall somewhere between hostile and downright impossible.

“I’ve stopped checking the forecast,” Knight said, with a sigh. “It has been a very testing time for people in our industry.”

For the past few years, the Premier League has issued each of its 20 members with a thick handbook filled with instructions on how to maintain their pitches. The guidelines – well, rules, really – go into forensic detail on almost every aspect of grass maintenance: how it should be mowed, how wet it should be, the minimum and maximum permissible lengths for each blade.

The level of care taken attests to one of those often unspoken but generally understood truths about football: pitches matter. It is easy, for example, to attribute the sweeping stylistic changes in English football in the past 20 years to the genius of Arsène Wenger and Pep Guardiola. It is possible, too, to believe it is all a result of the Premier League’s wealth drawing the world’s best players to England.

There is a seed of truth in both, obviously, but it is not quite the whole story.

There is a reason that football in the north of Europe has always been a little more direct than the game in the south of the continent. Colder, wetter winters traditionally meant that most pitches were churned up over the course of the season, and it is not feasible to pass the ball around in a mudbath.

It is not a coincidence that Wenger’s and Guardiola’s ideas were able to catch on – to change the way that most English teams want to play football – at a time when the country’s pitches could now be more or less perfect all year round.

Just as the idea of the high press is a direct consequence of the change in the backpass rule in 1992, so the more expansive style that has been de rigueur for 20 years has its roots in the rapid transformation of pitches. The managers know that; most, now, will give their club’s groundskeepers specific instructions on how long the grass should be, trying as much as they can to ensure it suits their side’s approach. As the existence, and the particularity, of the handbook suggests, the Premier League knows the playing surface has been a vital ingredient in creating a compelling product.

This season, that has been a challenge. If the leitmotif for much of this campaign has been English football’s gradual reversion to the 1990s – long throws, goalmouth scrambles from corners, what can obliquely be referred to as a more direct style – then, thanks to the endless rain, a few pitches have followed suit.

The most striking examples, understandably, are in the EFL, where clubs cannot plough the same resources into their playing surfaces as their Premier League counterparts – before their FA Cup tie with Wolves last week, Grimsby’s players were instructed to use the Blundell Park mud to their advantage – but the world’s richest league has not proved immune.

Source: Everton FC

Robin Roefs, for example, ended his Sunderland team’s meeting with Liverpool earlier this month in a state that can only be described as muddy, an adjective that had all but been eliminated from the modern Premier League.

At least one club’s groundstaff have privately acknowledged feeling distinctly overwhelmed in recent weeks. Clubs want to use their pitches more and more: men’s football, women’s football, academy football, other sports, other events. At the same time, it just keeps raining. The task of producing a pristine pitch, in those conditions, feels unavoidably Canutian. 

***

Jon Howell is still learning about his pitch. He has been working on the grounds team at Everton for 23 years. In that time, he came to know the turf at Goodison Park intimately. He knew what it wanted, what it needed, its quirks and its foibles. It was a “labour of love,” he said, not just for him, but for his family. His daughter, now grown-up, learnt to walk on the pitch at Goodison.

He knew that it would take time to build up the same relationship with the pitch at the club’s new home, Hill Dickinson Stadium. “Every pitch is different,” he said. “Every stadium is different. They each have their own microclimates.”

The scale of that difference is astonishing. Despite sitting on the Mersey, Hill Dickinson gets very little wind. Goodison gets more sunshine, when there is any sunshine to have.

Often, Howell said, the rain that sweeps in from across the Wirral skips the new stadium, and hits the old. (Mostly, this winter, both have been wet.)

Even inside the stadium, the differences can be pronounced. For reasons he and his team are only just coming to understand, the South Stand at Hill Dickinson is colder than the North, despite being only 105 metres apart, by several degrees.

He knows all of that because looking after the pitch is not, as his friends sometimes tell him, simply a matter of mowing it a couple of times a week and painting on some lines. “It’s a living thing,” Howell said. “Sometimes it needs to rest. Sometimes it needs to drink. Sometimes it needs a little encouragement.”

To do that, Howell and Knight – Everton’s head of grounds, overseeing the pitches at the three stadiums under the club’s auspices, as well as the 16 pitches at its training base at Finch Farm – do not just have a team of 17 people to tend to it, but a whole arsenal of technological weaponry, too.

There are artificial lights and heaters to stimulate growth, and pods to measure pH balance and moisture and soil temperature. Like most modern pitches, the field at Hill Dickinson is a hybrid of grass and just a little artificial turf, a sort of anchor; unlike most modern pitches, it effectively sits on a mattress of air, to improve both heating and drainage.

Preparing the pitch for a game takes about 10 days. Even the seed itself is grown in a laboratory.

“There is a huge amount of science behind it,” said Howell. “The amount of data we have, we’re scientists.” Often, though, that data is used as a second source. Most of the time, they know what the pitch might need.

Bedding in a new pitch is a sufficiently complicated process that Howell, Knight and their team knew this season would be an education; the weather has made that even more pronounced.

Hill Dickinson has storage for more than 500,000 litres of water; that has been filled, Howell said, possibly twice over.

The lack of sunshine, if anything, has been even harder. “The artificial lights are really good but grass does prefer natural sunlight,” Knight said. “You can’t really overcome a billion years of evolution.”

For all the complications they’ve faced, both are pleased with how the pitch has held up. The fact that it has, in a way, illustrates the scale of the job. “Everything we do to this pitch is artificial,” said Howell.

Grass, ultimately, should not grow in these temperatures, in these conditions, with so much rain and so little sun. That it does – that English football can look like it does – is testament to the science, to the technology, and to the expertise of Knight, and Howell, and all of their peers at all clubs, somehow winning their constant battle against the weather.