As the world turns its attention to the 2026 World Cup — 39 days, 48 teams, 104 matches and more than 1,200 pairs of cleated feet — one of the tournament’s most demanding challenges will be beneath the players: the grass.
FIFA requires every World Cup match to be played on natural, living turf. The surface must also provide a consistent playing experience across venues, including predictable ball bounce, roll and player footing. And, of course, it has to look green.
That is a formidable task for the 2026 tournament, which will be staged across 16 stadiums in three countries. Five venues are domed, eight have permanent artificial turf that must be covered, and the host cities span a wide range of climates.
“We have this massive, massive tournament footprint,” said Alan Ferguson, FIFA’s senior pitch management manager. “Trying to bring that together in a uniform manner has been our biggest challenge.”
Under Ferguson’s direction, FIFA has worked with a team of turf specialists led by John Sorochan at the University of Tennessee and John Rogers at Michigan State University. Since 2018, they have studied how to create a consistent natural surface for every match.
The science of turf
There are two dozen species of turf grass, and they do not behave the same way. Kentucky bluegrass is suited to cooler conditions, lower light and shorter growing seasons. Bermuda grass thrives in warm weather but struggles in shade. Perennial ryegrass germinates quickly but is more prone to divots.
Both Bermuda grass and Kentucky bluegrass spread laterally and can be cut short, making them well suited to soccer fields. Each grass type, and each blend of grasses, has its own growth rate, water needs, ideal mowing height and interaction with players’ footwear.
To study how different turf combinations respond to athletic movement, Sorochan’s team developed the fLEX, a portable testing device fitted with a 3-D-printed soccer cleat. It strikes the turf with the same impact, acceleration and cutting motion as a 168-pound athlete — the average weight of a men’s World Cup player — then measures how much energy the surface absorbs and returns.
“Other machines are just a vertical drop, like it’s a missile or something,” Sorochan said. “This is the first time we’ve actually got something that really mimics a consistent strike of a foot.”
The ball must also behave consistently. FIFA’s Turf Test Manual requires a FIFA Quality Pro ball released from an approved one-meter apparatus, such as the Turf-Tec FIFA Ball Ramp, to roll five to eight meters, with tests performed in multiple locations and directions. A test specimen dropped from two meters using the RedDrop Ball Rebound Tester must rebound between 60 centimeters and 100 centimeters.
Those standards apply regardless of whether the surface is natural or synthetic, Bermuda or Kikuyu, at sea level or at Mexico City’s elevation of 7,300 feet. Sorochan and his colleagues conducted those tests and many others.
“We compared Bermuda grass versus bluegrass and rye grass and synthetic turf,” he said. “And we launched a soccer ball in at 55 kilometers an hour at 17 degrees, and used a high-speed camera to measure the coefficient of restitution of the ball coming out, the velocity, everything.”
The conclusion was to use Bermuda grass in the open-air stadiums in Miami and Monterrey, Mexico, while indoor domes and northern venues would use a custom blend of 84 percent Kentucky bluegrass and 16 percent ryegrass. The goal, Sorochan said, is a playing experience that is “uniform and homogeneous across all 16 stadiums.”
Growing and transporting the fields
The sod for 15 stadiums was grown at nine sod farms across Canada, Mexico and the United States. Mexico City grew its field from seed inside the stadium. For one of the longest trips, two dozen refrigerated trucks transported rolls of sod 1,400 miles over 30 hours from Colorado to Atlanta.
A key innovation for 2026 is a farming method known as sod on plastic. Traditionally, harvesting sod cuts through the roots, which can cause transplant shock and leave the turf slower to establish itself. For the World Cup, the grass was grown on a thin layer of sand over a plastic sheet. The roots grow downward and then sideways, forming a dense, resilient mat. The sod can then be cut, rolled, transported and installed with less stress.
Once installed, the natural turf is reinforced with plastic fibers stitched into the surface by a machine that resembles a cross between a steamroller and a sewing machine. The fibers anchor the roots and help stabilize the field, much like rebar in concrete.
Keeping the pitches alive
A soccer field is not a fixed playing surface like a basketball court or hockey rink. It is a living system. After installation, the turf must remain healthy for several weeks, a particularly difficult task inside domed stadiums.
“The advancement of stadium design kind of overtook the maintenance of the soccer field,” Ferguson said. “When the stadiums went to the wraparound — the enclosed roof to protect the fans and give them a better experience — they started to shut out things like air and sunlight.”
The temporary World Cup fields are built like life-support systems. Beneath the rolled sod are several inches of sand, which provide firm cushioning while allowing roots to breathe during weeks of play. Below that is a layer of gravel or plastic Permavoid, connected to a drainage system that can pump water in or out. Two-ton LED grow lights are rolled in for 12 hours a day, while industrial fans move air across the surface to reduce fungal risk.
Testing continues throughout the tournament. In every stadium, officials monitor traction, moisture and surface hardness, though Ferguson noted that FIFA does not want to damage the pitches by testing them excessively.
Watching the tournament from the ground up
Ferguson will oversee the effort from FIFA’s Tournament Operations Center in Miami, where staff members monitor weather, travel delays and stadium updates around the clock.
“Every minute and every second of every game, I’ll watch here,” he said. “We’re looking for slips, bad bounces, something that just doesn’t look quite right with the field. Hopefully we don’t get a whole lot of that.”
Only when his native Scotland takes the field will he look away from the pitch, he said: “Scotland first, pitch second in that 90 minutes.”