Bristol City FC is a professional football club based in Bristol, England, committed to delivering the highest quality playing surfaces for its players. To achieve this, the club continuously seeks innovative solutions to ensure both precision and efficiency in their grounds maintenance.
THE CHALLENGE
Maintaining high-quality pitches at Bristol City FC was labor-intensive and time-consuming. With the team facing staffing shortages, they needed a solution to reduce the strain on their workforce while ensuring precision.
THE SOLUTION
In the summer of 2023, Bristol City FC decided to automate their line marking process with a Turf Tank robot which significantly increased productivity while delivering high precision.
No Compromise on Quality: Perfect Lines & Efficiency
Joe Berry, Head Groundsman at Bristol City FC had previously relied on traditional methods for line marking their pitches, a labor-intensive process requiring substantial time and manpower. As the team found themselves short-staffed, it became clear they needed a more efficient way to keep up with their growing responsibilities:
“We were a member of staff down, and we find it hard to recruit, so I had to come up with more creative ways of potentially getting an extra staff member.”
They initially explored other robotic solutions, but found issues with signal coverage. This impacted the precision of the line marking. For a professional club like Bristol City FC, quality is non-negotiable, and ensuring the lines are accurate is critical. That’s why they decided to give Turf Tank a go. With its local base station, Turf Tank ensures lines are within 1 cm accuracy, meeting the club’s high standards for pitch quality.
Once the Turf Tank robot was integrated into their operations, the impact on productivity was immediate.
By getting a robot, it freed up staff that otherwise would have been marking, to do other jobs.
Joe Berry,
Head Groundsman
“It definitely saves us time across the whole site, because people normally will pick up little jobs around the pitches where the Turf Tank is marking. So we can keep an eye on the Turf Tank whilst doing jobs that might be potentially put off till last in previous years.”
“Probably a half a day’s work on the Turf Tank, which would have been two days’ work with marking for two people. If you look at it like that, then it’s saving three and a half days.”
| Manual marking |
| 2 people |
| 2 days |
| Turf Tank |
| 1 person 5 minutes setup |
| ½ day robot marking |
Effortless Pitch Layout Customization
Another important aspect for a professional club is providing the ideal training environment for their players. That’s where training lines play an important role, and with Turf Tank, marking these lines has become effortless. “We can easily set up training lines using the tablet. Once the layout is saved, it’s as simple as pressing start,” explains Joe.
Our pitches have multiple tactical lines on, and it was relatively easy to just upload that to the tablet. You have to be patient and maybe go out and do a couple of dry runs once you’ve programmed it to the robot, but once they’re in, it’s saved us countless hours, and it wasn’t too hard at all.
Once you get used to using the tablet, I think you can kind of do whatever you want with it.
Joe Berry,
Head Groundsman
The versatility of the Turf Tank robot opened up a range of possibilities for Joe’s team. Beyond the club’s football pitches, the robot is now used to mark different field layouts for Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital School.
“It has been helpful on the school side of things, because occasionally football clubs might hire the school fields out for tournaments. Rather than having to initially mark six junior pitches for a tournament, just for one weekend, we’ve been able to just program them on the tablet, and it saves so much time. Also, when it comes from changing the pitches over from football to athletics, again, we can really leave that athletic marking until the last possible day before the school come back. It saves us marking and over marking an athletics track just because you want to get it done in advance of the school coming back from half term.”
It’s definitely taken the strain off me at quite a busy time
Joe Berry,
Head Groundsman
Conclusion
The introduction of the Turf Tank robot revolutionised grounds maintenance for Bristol City FC. The autonomous robot significantly enhanced both efficiency and precision in their line marking processes, ensuring the club continues to deliver the highest quality, while saving valuable time for the grounds team.
