Welcome everybody to Soccer 101. Thank you, as always, for joining us.

My name is Taylor Rockwell, and this week we're

talking about a topic that mirrors the history of soccer itself, its football pitches.

The evolution of soccer pitches reflects the game's journey from casual pastime to global

professional sport. What began as simple fields of varying quality, but usually poor quality,

transformed into engineering systems designed to optimize player safety, ball movement, consistent playability throughout the year,

utilizing some crazy technology that I did not know existed.

Graham Ruffin, was there any particular bit of technology you learned about in preparing for

this show that you either didn't know about or became fascinated by or maybe slightly intimidated by, as was the case for me.

Hello, Taylor Rockwell. I think the light, the heat lamps, which I have seen in stadiums previously,

they always appealed to me as a Scot. I just think, like, I just get underneath them,

get a nice summer glow. They always, they always appeal to me. And they're always huge as well. Like, they must be so expensive. I did look into the price of a number of different things. I didn't look into the price of those lamps. I imagine those are not cheap. For me, it was the computerized irrigation where they like, I knew that they did like the player tracking and the

player performance tracking where you know like the how many sprints they ran and what was

their top speed and distance covered and everything. But to know like the individual moisture

levels of certain parts of the pitch and how to then adjust the seating to make sure that it does

the like it's too much, Graham. It's too much knowledge.

I don't know if we need to know that much about lawn care. Well, you should tell some of the people who live around me. Before we started recording, there was a person outside your window, I believe, Taylor. Still going. Just open the window, ask that guy, you want to come on the show, talk about hybrid pitches. based on his technology, I'm going to assume that he is not big on hybrid pitches and does

not have a computerized moisture monitor level.

But he does have Bluetooth headphones that I'm going to assume are cranking classic rock,

which is a requirement for any sort of long care.

You have to be listening to that at all times.

Did drill.

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