Water Tech for Smarter Citizens

Are you a fan of football? Fans and players alike tend to prefer a soft, green pitch: it provides the best possible conditions for a great game. A portfolio company in two of team Solutions’ funds has brought to market a smart solution that applies rainwater and reused water to create a perfectly green football pitch.

Every drop counts

Extreme weather patterns, featuring too much or too little rain, are an increasingly common experience in countries around the world. Consequently, prices have soared in periods of drought, and the strain on public water sources has increased.

The football industry is one sector where the impact has been marked, as keeping a football pitch green requires up to 23 000 litres of water each day. Applying resource management tactics, like watering football pitches at night, can save 85 percent of water, compared to daytime watering. This is due to the lower rates of water evaporation at nighttime[1]. Driven by the need to both safeguard this valuable resource – water – and to manage costs, football clubs worldwide are now aware of water efficiency issues.

Man City signs Xylem

In the UK, the Manchester City Football Club has taken the step to optimize its pitch maintenance by applying cutting edge water management technology. Last week, the club launched a new system in partnership with Xylem, a leading smart water tech company. Xylem has been a long-term position in both Storebrand Smart Cities and Storebrand Global Solutions.

The club uses Xylem’s digital water platform “Xylem Vue” to monitor and predict how to best distribute the water for optimized irrigation. Manchester City’s home ground Etihad Stadium has saved fifty million litres of water by using rainwater and water recycling for irrigation instead of public potable water. The club’s target is to use 100 percent of rainwater by summer next year[2].

Premium player in water tech

Xylem has a global presence, with over 23 000 employees, customers in over 150 countries, and revenues of USD 8.6 billion[3].

With a slightly pricier valuation relative to peers, Xylem can be characterized as a quality company that has the ability to find beneficial business opportunities. With its stable increase in top line revenue, a gross margin around 37 percent and annually increasing Earnings Per Share (EPS), the firm seems to surf an important wave of the “access to clean water” megatrend.

An example is Xylem’s acquisition of the water giant Evoqua Water Technologies in May 2023, in an all-stock deal worth USD 7.5 billion[4]. The cost synergies and innovation benefits following the Evoqua merger seems to have helped Xylem fight the global uncertainties headwinds of trade wars and tariffs, so far in 2025. While the transaction faced some opposition for being overpriced, it did place Xylem on the throne as the world’s largest water tech company.

The combination of size, sound corporate governance, innovation, expertise and experience can help Xylem weather hefty storms – and show how the grass can be greener, in more ways than one, on the football pitch.

This year’s UEFA Champions League Final is being played on May 31^st at Allianz Arena in Munich. Although this arena has yet to implement Xylem’s water technology, Bayern Munich’s home stadium took its first sustainability steps already in 2018 and is set to be climate-neutral by 2040[5]. With an impressive solar panel rooftop, rainwater collection, energy efficient LED lighting, electric bus charging infrastructure and proximity to the metro, the arena combines solid track record of footballing magic with high sustainability ambitions for both current and future games.

About Xylem Vue

A full suite of digital solutions that helps solve challenges such as reducing water loss and costs, increasing energy efficiency and asset reliability, and boosting operational resilience. Xylem Vue combines smart and connected technologies, intelligent systems and services, integrating and managing all data from any source in a single platform, for a complete view of water and wastewater networks.