How much water is used to make a Premier League pitch perfect?

Premier League pitches have become suspiciously perfect. Watch footage from the 1980s and an English winter could turn a football ground into something between a field and a swamp. Now the league sails through December with surfaces so uniformly green that the occasional patch of worn grass can feel like grounds for an inquiry.

Keeping them that way requires rather more than regular mowing.

Water is one of the groundsman’s essential tools. It keeps grass healthy, strengthens root systems, helps pitches recover after matches and affects how the ball moves across the surface. Too little and grass becomes stressed while the ground can harden. Too much and the surface softens, roots become shallower and unwanted grasses can thrive.

And the quantities involved can be substantial. One way of understanding the scale is to forget annual totals and look at the pitch itself. Sports-turf specialists STRI calculate that applying just one millimetre of water to a standard 105m by 68m surface requires around 7,140 litres. A 3mm irrigation cycle needs about 21,400 litres; 6mm requires almost 43,000.

Exactly how often that is necessary depends on the weather, soil, grass and condition of the pitch. There isn’t a useful single answer to how much water a Premier League pitch consumes.

Manchester City provide some idea of the upper end. The club say a natural-grass pitch at their City Football Academy can require more than 23,000 litres of water a day during peak summer conditions. Multiply that across a modern training complex and the numbers become enormous. City’s academy has 16 pitches, while Arsenal maintain 11 Premier League-quality surfaces at London Colney.

Irrigation needs vary throughout the year. The same surface might require substantial watering during a hot July afternoon and almost none during a wet winter week.

Even rain does not necessarily mean the sprinklers stay off. Grounds staff use water partly to manipulate playing characteristics, with players generally preferring a slick surface that allows the ball to travel quickly. Modern elite pitches are highly engineered environments rather than patches of grass that happen to receive particularly attentive gardening.

That creates an obvious problem during a drought.

In the week ending September 8 this year, 10 Environment Agency areas were in drought and every other area was experiencing prolonged dry weather. National reservoir storage stood at 56.9%, almost 20 percentage points below the level expected for the time of year, while temporary-use bans covered around 30 million people.

Football pitches are hardly the biggest concern during a national shortage, but those conditions strengthen the case for clubs to reduce their reliance on mains water wherever alternatives are available.

Manchester City provide perhaps the clearest example. This month, the club announced that all 16 pitches at the City Football Academy are now irrigated exclusively with rainwater. Since July 2023, City say the system has saved 80 million litres of clean water.

The infrastructure is appropriately large. Beneath the academy is an attenuation system with storage capacity of around 12 million litres. Rainfall and water moving through the site can be captured, stored and reused rather than being allowed to disappear into the drainage network before being replaced with mains water when the pitches become dry.

Technology increasingly decides when that water is needed too. City’s Xylem Vue system uses sensors, connected meters and real-time analysis to monitor how water moves around the training facility, allowing staff to identify where it is being consumed or lost and target irrigation more precisely.

Arsenal have been doing something similar for much longer. A recycling system installed at London Colney in 2011 channels excess irrigation water through underground pipes and into a reservoir capable of holding two million litres. Rain falling on most of the site’s buildings is also collected. Arsenal say the system harvests between 15 million and 20 million litres annually, with filtration removing bacteria and sediment before the water is pumped back out to pitches and gardens.

Liverpool have taken another route. At Anfield, their academy and training centre, water for pitches is obtained from boreholes where possible. Grounds staff monitor grass health and soil moisture, while weather stations calculate evapotranspiration, essentially how much water is being lost from the soil and plants, to determine how much irrigation is actually required.

Watering is generally carried out during darkness to reduce losses through evaporation, with Liverpool estimating that their irrigation system saves approximately 20% of the water used on pitches.

Tottenham say they have reduced irrigation consumption at their stadium by 57% compared with their 2021-22 baseline, using advanced monitoring alongside their grounds team.

These systems are becoming more important because English groundskeepers face an awkward combination. Premier League expectations for playing surfaces have never been higher, while the climate supplying the water required to maintain them is becoming less predictable.

STRI warned this month that UK venues increasingly have to deal with longer dry periods followed by intense rainfall. Water can therefore be scarce precisely when pitches need it, then arrive in quantities that sites are unable to capture.

The obvious response is to stop thinking about rain merely as something to drain away.

Football grounds are unusually well suited to harvesting rain. Stadiums and training centres have enormous roofs and expanses of land from which water can be collected. UEFA’s sustainable infrastructure guidance recommends capturing water draining from stadium precincts for reuse, including pitch irrigation, and highlights underground storage systems capable of providing passive irrigation from below.

That does not mean Premier League pitches are about to become less immaculate. If anything, the technology required to keep them perfect is becoming more sophisticated.

The next step in pitch maintenance isn’t finding ever greater quantities of water to pour onto the grass. It is capturing the rain when it arrives, storing it until it is needed and using sensors to make sure as little as possible is wasted.

English football spent decades learning how to get water off its pitches. Increasingly, the clever bit is working out how to keep it.