For the Love of Grass: Joel Barney’s tender portrait of football’s unsung heroes

“A film about the art of grass cutting and so much more than that”, Joel Barney’s For the Love of Grass is a personal project that began in the run up to the 2024/25 season. Primarily, it’s a means for director to finally combine his love for football and filmmaking. Raised in Hampshire, the Hove-based director “grew up surrounded by football, going to Southampton matches with my dad and playing Sunday league with school mates”, he tells us. “I’d known for a while that I wanted to work on a passion project uncovering a niche subculture within football, but hadn’t come across a story that had fully captured my attention.”

After working on a few campaigns for the club he supports – Southampton FC – both the director and his longtime collaborator and DOP Oscar Ferguson, struck up a conversation about how fascinating it was that “a single rectangle of grass is so important to so many people’s lives: fans, players, coaches, club owners”. Despite this importance, the people that look after and maintain the pitches themselves are often completely overlooked — that is of course unless the pitch affects the play.

So, armed with a spare roll of 16mm film, the pair began a deep dive into the quieter side of (ahem) grassroots football, uncovering that the precise preparation and upkeep of the field was in fact filled with as much pride and joy as the game itself. To capture some of the untold stories behind the sport, the pair began their string of conversations with an Alresford Town groundsman who Joel’s dad had grown up playing alongside at the club. From there, they went on to have conversations with groundsmen at Eastleigh FC as well as those looking after the pitch at Southampton, shining a light on the field’s unsung heroes and finding out what brought them to the trade.

“We were so pleasantly surprised by how forthcoming they were,” says Joel. “It was so fascinating to hear them talk about their craft, the varying levels and scales of what they do [...] but it all boils down to their pure love and passion for the sport,” he says. “Each of them in their own ways had some sort of connection to football growing up, with football having played a pivotal role in their life in some way.”

Pretty early on in the process Joel and Oscar decided that they were going to commit to capturing these stories at a slower pace, using a tripod to shoot the whole project static. “The idea being that the film would feel like a collection of moving photographs, frozen in time,” says Joel. An edit with a bit more breathing room is now something Joe wants to take forward in more work at the pair’s creative production studio Sonder. Working across commercials and music videos over the years, “my brain has become programmed to create pacey, snappy edits working in the commercial space, but actually the work that takes the time to slow down and step back is actually the work now that seems to be cutting through the noise,” he says. The film was a refreshing side step out of the normal cut and pace of things – a way to capitalise on the slowness offered by shooting analogue.

Whether a passion project or something commercial, Joel’s filmmaking pursuits often pull back the curtain on a community, subculture or an individual, working with real people on screen to get an authentic look or new angle on everyday things. This time dedicated to the people that tend to the pitch day in and day out at their beloved local club, Joel hopes that For the Love of Grass celebrates “the dedication and hard work they put into their craft”. The director concludes: “On a personal level I have so many memories I cherish that surround football and without the unsung hard work of the grounds teams, none of it would be possible [...] I always wanted this to be a film not only football fans enjoy, but everyone.”