Name: FIFA Is Staking Its $3.8 Billion World Cup on Unprecedented Grass Experiment
Uploaded: 2026-06-09T16:00:00Z
Duration: 6 min 35 s
Description: FIFA is spending millions to ensure every World Cup pitch plays the same. See how scientists are engineering grass that delivers a consistent game across 16 stadiums.

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FIFA is spending millions to ensure every World Cup pitch plays the same. See how scientists are engineering grass that delivers a consistent game across 16 stadiums. Photo: Benjamin Tiede

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FIFA is spending millions to ensure every World Cup pitch plays the same. See how scientists are engineering grass that delivers a consistent game across 16 stadiums.

FIFA Is Staking Its $3.8 Billion World Cup on Unprecedented Grass Experiment

The 2026 World Cup is a massive undertaking with 104 matches in 16 stadiums across three countries.

It's the biggest football tournament on the planet that has ever happened.

And one of the biggest challenges is creating consistent surfaces for the tournament to be played on.

FIFA requires a natural grass pitch. That's the first and foremost. It has to be natural grass.

But in many stadiums, installing natural grass has never been possible. All of the US venues are NFL stadiums, which use smaller fields, and grass is fussy. It needs oxygen, water, and massive amounts of light.

We're talking six, seven years for this pitch project just to happen, and now it's reality.

We can look at this one where there's different fertilizer. Three o'clock in the afternoon, this is the equivalent of the sun coming up. We're trying to find the balance of what's enough light to get the grass to grow and when we traffic it that it's gonna hold up, 'cause it's a living organism. You abuse it, it's gonna die. And that's kind of what we've worked on for the last three years inside of this building. I've been doing sports turf research since fall of 1992 when I started working as a student at Michigan State University in preparation for the '94 World Cup. And I've been doing sports turf research pretty aggressively since then. If you talk to any player related in the World Cup, I'm pretty confident they would all say they would way rather play on natural grass, especially ones that score a lot of goals and they want to run and do that knee slide to the flag. You don't wanna be sliding on artificial turf and burning all the skin off your knees. This is the Bermuda grass that's being used for the warm season stadium. So Guadalajara, Monterrey, Kansas City, San Francisco, Miami, and in New York, New Jersey. What's unique about Bermuda grass is it grows by above ground runners that we call stolons. It also grows by rhizomes, which are below ground runners, and you can see 'em going below in the sand below here. And so this grass grows above ground and below ground. So when you do wear it out, it can fill in. But those rhizomes also act like anchors to stabilize that sand. In the cool season climates and in the dome stadiums, we're using Kentucky Bluegrass and Perennial Ryegrass, and Kentucky Bluegrass grows by rhizomes, but not the stolons. Not as aggressively as the Bermuda grass, but it grows by those, so you get some of that anchoring effect.

Think of the pitch as a layer cake. It's built directly on top of the stadium's existing turf. First is either a gravel or modular plastic layer packed with drainage pipes to prevent flooding. On top of that are several inches of specialized sand giving the roots room to breathe. And finally, the playing surface that you actually see on TV: a thin one and three quarter inch shell of living sod.

We wanna make sure when that athlete's running and cutting, they're gonna have the same feel afoot. We also research to look at not just the athlete performance, but how does the ball bounce and roll on that surface as well. And so we want surfaces, even though they're different types of grass, to be as homogenous and consistent and uniform as possible. Really tough to pull 'em out. We need a pair of pliers. So this is the flex device. This is a device we developed at the University of Tennessee and can simulate a foot strike of a foot hitting the surface. If the surface isn't very good, like the natural grass surface, it might tear up or divot, and we can test different surfaces all with the same weight and the same cleat so we can look at the variability of the surface. This has been really instrumental for us for '26.

And then there's the matter of scaling the experiment across an entire continent.

We've had to bring the grass from Denver, Colorado, because the type of grass that's growing inside the stadium is a cool season grass. And typically, we're not able to establish cool season grass in Texas long enough to make a sod that's transportable.

The delivery is a race against time. A stadium's worth of sod has to travel in dozens of refrigerated trucks with rotating drivers, keeping the shipment moving around the clock. The stadiums need to prepare the infrastructure in advance so that the sod can immediately be laid down and the roots can begin to expand. In some stadiums like Dallas, accommodating all that infrastructure meant raising the entire pitch by more than a foot.

There is many, many trucks that have come in and out of here over the last two months, that's for sure. Grass is a natural product. It's living, and we have to work with it, not against it. We are bringing it into an environment where it may not naturally kind of grow, so we need to care for it, treat it, and seeing it succeed. Typically, we are looking around 12 hours that they'll be on, and then they'll be off for 12 hours.

Because of the vast differences in stadium design and local climates, FIFA has to deploy a completely unique recipe for every single venue. In Mexico City, stadium managers had to cultivate a grass variety the high altitude venue has never grown in its history. Across almost every American football venue, massive structural renovations had to be done to make a soccer pitch fit in the space, and in Houston, engineers had to compress the entire process to avoid disrupting the annual livestock show and rodeo.

Currently, we see behind me we're installing the pitch for the FIFA World Cup, and the final two days ago we were in Philadelphia doing exactly the same process. Today we've started Vancouver. So it's a huge, huge project. It's unforgiving, to be honest. It's just a really cool challenge to be a part of.

Many of the stadiums will remove the grass after the World Cup ends, but researchers hope to prove that natural grass playing surfaces are possible across sports.

I hope there's a, you know, legacy effect of this. We've done the research, we've done the evidence-based science behind what you can have no matter what the sport is or what the level of sport is, you can have an ideal natural grass surface, whether you're little Mary playing soccer at 35 pounds to Bubba playing American football at 350 pounds. We can have a grass surface for anyone that wants to have it.

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