A Day as a Steward

Hi

For this post I thought I would take you through my day as a Steward. I am using the place I work most often for this and will give you a little bit of specific information to help with painting the picture in your head.

Where I work most of the time is at Football matches. Most of these take place in a stadium in a large UK city. The stadium has a capacity of over 45,000 spectators and was originally built over 20 years ago. It has multiple levels of seating, as well as various levels of corporate hospitality.

To make things a little easier, we are going to base this on a match kicking off on a Saturday at 3PM.

For a kick off at this time I would need to be inside the stadium and ready to start at least 3 hours prior to the kick off time, so 12PM (or Midday) in this case. I would leave home about 1 hour prior to this to ensure I am there in time.

At, or just after 12PM all stewards receive their ‘Pre Match Briefing’. The briefing lasts around 20 minutes and is given by a Senior Supervisor or more often a Stand Manager (I will cover what these roles are and what they do in a later blog). The numbers of these roles depend on the size of the stadium but in this one there are 5 Stand Managers (one for each stand, plus a separate one for the section occupied by away team supporters). The briefing covers all areas specific to this fixture including but not limited to: Number of away fans, their location, how they are travelling, any specific intelligence relating to behaviour. Also who the referee/match officials are, whether the game is on UK tv or not (all games are broadcast live internationally), the colour of Single Match accreditation passes for this fixture and a variety of other bits of information which might be useful.

Once this briefing is complete we are assigned out positions for the game and told who our DIRECT supervisor will be. We then go to the level/sections our positions are on and if on a concourse or vomitory (but not if on a turnstile or the pitch perimeter) we will carry out a ‘sweep’ of the area, which basically means a walkthrough and visual inspection of the level, looking out for any damage or for anything unusual.

Once this is complete we go to our post. This has to be before 1PM as that is that is two hours prior to kick off and is when the gates open and spectators can enter the stadium. And aside from getting a drink or using the toilet we are on post continuously until all spectators have left and we are stood own - usually around 30 to 40 minutes after the full time whistle has gone (by 5:30PM). We then carry out another ‘sweep’ of the same area as earlier. Following this we return to the area of our earlier briefing and wait to be released, which is when our shit ends. This is ususally by 17:45PM.

I will go into some of the parts of this in more detail at a later point.

But until then……….Thanks and see you next time……..