Will the new Wembley pitch ever be any good?

The yanks build stadiums for fun and at a massive fraction of the cost we seem to spend on them.

I remember reading about them when we were building ours, and once a bit of leeway (?) was given for how the £ ususally does against the $ and inflation they still end up very cheap.

For example the FedExField stadium has 91,704 seats and cost $250.5m in 1997 or $333.4m in today's money. I couldn't believe how much ours was for ~60,000 but then realised we did a lot to the surrounding area (it's probably worth nothing that the yanks have the advantage of plenty of land). Then I heard about Wembley..
 
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Building in america is cheap, so are land costs and they rarely build a new 100k seater stadium on premium land close to the centre of the biggest city in the country.

That same stadium you're talking about built in the middle of Manhattan would have cost 3 times as much due to land pricing, but thats life and they choose to build somewhere cheap which makes perfect sense.


Frankly though they had the land so that wasn't an issue, it was just mismanaged start to finish and labour and materials costs are bigger in the UK, it still shouldn't have cost really much more than Arsenals and as you said, ours had many other costs factored into it like station refurbishments and things.

As Chimaera said, it probably needs the pitch and everything underneath it redoing from scratch, however its got to be built upon the existing surroundings and foundations and if the drainage type issues are too big maybe nothing drastic can be done. Though they could increase the height of the pitch for several inches which would allow more drainage and space for airflow to dry the soil underneath.

As with most things, the FA just half-arsed it, seats = money so cram as many as them in as possible on as tight a budget as possible and cut corners everywhere else, which includes pitch quality.

As said, I think our main and best groundsman went to Real Madrid a couple years back after basically Emirates was established, no long term issues cropped up, and its basically just maintainance now, the FA need to get that guy in for advice, and sort it out.

I'm not a fan of Spurs, or Dawson, but its a shame to watch a match that the first and really crucial goal is scored due to slipping because of the quality of the pitch.

I mean, honestly, do we want to see a World Cup final at Wembley and England lose because someone loses their footing in the dying seconds? Surely the complaints by basically all players and managers since it was built after every game will hurt bids for World cups/euro cups and securing other friendlies there?

It needs fixing asap.
 
It does sound as if maybe he wasn't particularly involved in the building of the thing which sounds, wrong basically. If he was hired a year or two before the pitch was laid, but he's pretty much saying the construction guys laid the turf/pitch too early and he wasn't able to do anything till after essentially the keys were handed over. Personally I do lay responsibility on him, he should have, in one of those years, in multiple conversations insisted on being involved heavily rather than waiting to be handed control when it was too late.

Its like someone watching their house being built, watching the builders put the stairs in the wrong place, but doing nothing, saying nothing and complaining after they are finished and hand the keys over.

He was hired before the pitch was laid, knew they were putting it down badly and too early and did nothing, for me, thats a huge failure on his part to not get something sorted out and the FA to speak with the construction people and sort out how to get the pitch done properly.

Yes if he'd had full control it probably would have turned out better, but if you're hired for a job, and don't do anything about the problem till a couple of years later, what the heck was he doing for that couple of years?
 
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