Clear as Mud

Wembley Stadium cost around £750m. The brief for a building this large and complex must have been formidable. However at its heart was a non-negotiable – provide a grass pitch suitable for playing football.

During the 1980s I ran a UK Government study on the use of school playing fields. The focus of the analysis was about the utilisation of pitches in terms of number of hours usage a week by numbers of pupils. In seeking best practice I discovered a school in the West of Scotland with the best utilisation rates in the UK. So I contacted the person responsible to arrange a fact finding visit. My first question was – how did he maintain the quality of the grass pitches given the high levels of use. Grass, he said, what grass – it’s just mud most of the year.

I suspect that somewhere in the Wembley stadium brief, as there was in my study, there are a whole lot of very focused SMART objectives – apart from . . .