MANCHESTER, England — Not long after he had taken up his post as Manchester City manager in 2016, Pep Guardiola called a meeting with the club’s grounds crew. He wanted to talk turf.
He outlined, in detail, his exact specifications for how they should cut the grass on the fields at the Etihad Stadium and the club’s training facility: the stadium turf, he said, should be no longer than 19 millimeters, just as he had it at Barcelona and Bayern Munich.
Delicately, the groundskeepers pointed out that the weather in Manchester is a little less balmy, a little more sodden, than Catalonia or Bavaria, and that perhaps the grass should be slightly longer to account for that.