FIFA 2026 Tickets: The refrigerated trucks will rumble down a thousand miles of highway, tracked by the minute and packed with rolls of the most precious grass in sports. They’ll arrive at SoFi Stadium in Southern California and other NFL stadiums next June, on the home stretch of a years-long search for solutions to a FIFA World Cup 2026 problem: turf. Seven of 11 U.S. venues have the artificial kind, but international soccer disdains it.
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So, as soccer’s crown jewel comes to North America, renowned professors, agronomists, engineers, and construction workers are on a mission to replace synthetic surfaces with what one expert lovingly calls some of the most micromanaged grass in the world. Their mission has spanned continents and universities, shade houses and sod farms, sun and artificial light. It has cost millions of dollars.
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World Cup Tickets: SoFi Stadium Pilots New Turf Plan for 2026
Because it has yielded a plan one that SoFi Stadium will pilot at the CONCACAF Nations League finals next week. The plan is to weave artificial fibers into natural grass grown on plastic, lay this hybrid grass on an innovative Permavoid drainage layer, and fuse a temporary pitch on par with the best of the English Premier League, as AT&T Stadium did last fall for the World Cup.
It will require an army of people and a 24/7 operation, computerized tractors and proprietary machinery, exhaustive testing, and constant tweaks over the coming 15 months. It sounds, perhaps, a bit excessive. But to FIFA, it’s of the highest importance, as FIFA World Cup chief Heimo Schirgi said. And it’s necessary, in part, because previous stateside soccer tournaments have been marred by fields that were a disaster.
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The most recent major one, the 2024 Copa América, opened on a pitch that players said felt “like a trampoline. Argentina defender Cristian Romero called the settings at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta very ugly. U.S. midfielder Weston McKennie, speaking the next day, spoken a gush shared by hundreds of pros who’ve visited NFL venues with crude mats for friendlies and other races: It’s trying, he said, to play on a football field, with laid grass that’s all patchy, and it breaks up every step you take.
FIFA 2026 Tickets: Challenges of Turf Installation for FIFA World Cup 2026
That, in a nutshell, is the problem FIFA confronted when it chose the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to host this World Cup. Eight of the 16 selected stadiums have artificial surfaces. Five have roofs. Some lacked underground infrastructure for ventilation and irrigation. It’s really difficult, says Adam Fullerton, Mercedes-Benz Stadium’s VP of operations, to put grass in stadiums like this. So, over the past few years, at FIFA’s command, they’ve built that critical infrastructure.
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In consultation with researchers, they’ve developed novel schemes to grow and maintain grass indoors. As ShowTime looms and dress rehearsals near, they’re confident in those schemes but also nervous for one very simple reason. This, says Otto Benedict, the SVP of facilities at SoFi Stadium, hasn’t been done before. The search for solutions began, in earnest, back in 2019 at a familiar place.
Football World Cup Tickets: Custom Turf Solutions for FIFA 2026 Stadiums
FIFA recruited John Sorochan and then Trey Rogers, turf grass gurus at the University of Tennessee and Michigan State, who in 1994 had confronted a similar challenge for soccer’s global governing body: putting grass in the Pontiac Silverdome for North America’s last men’s World Cup. Three decades later, they launched a multi-million-dollar research project.
They used the shade house at Tennessee to study indoor growing, and the asphalt pad at Michigan State to trial under-surface materials. They traveled the continent and the world and used a patent-pending flex device that simulates a cleated human foot hitting the grass and measures the forces generated to test probably 125 stadiums, including several in England, Sorochan says.
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That testing, plus thousands of other data points, allowed them to establish corridors, or benchmarks, for the ideal pitch. The home fields of Arsenal Emirates Stadium and Aston Villa Park were deemed the gold standards. But they could not, of course, just copy and paste those pitches from England. Their FIFA World Cup 2026 venues come with different capabilities and climates. Among those 16, they’ve taken an à la carte approach, even to seemingly simple things like grass type.
FIFA 2026 Tickets: Challenges of Installing Soccer Fields in NFL Stadiums
Toronto’s BMO Field, for example, had Kentucky bluegrass; Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium and several others use Bermuda grass; Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca has Kikuyu grass, a species native to East African highlands that suits the city’s altitude; SoFi and Lumen Field in Seattle will need a cool season species perhaps a mix of bluegrass and ryegrass while Atlanta and Houston will probably get something else.
A conventional soccer field sits on 12 inches of sand and feeds on sunlight plus water that can drain. The fields that ill-equipped NFL stadiums have used for soccer over the years were different and sometimes deficient. Strips of thick sod were laid over artificial turf or directly on the stadium’s floor. Some played fine, but others felt spongy or jumpy, depending on what, exactly, was underneath them.
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And if the fields were laid only a few days before a game, with insufficient time to settle, they’d be patchy. But if they were laid too early for a multi-week tournament, without proper irrigation and air flow, they’d start to die. The World Cup accentuated this challenge. It is the most intense match schedule of any tournament, says Alan Ferguson, FIFA’s field management czar.
World Cup Tickets: Experts Innovate Turf for FIFA 2026
So, for 2026, the irrigation and ventilation schemes became non-negotiables. Stadiums such as SoFi, Mercedes-Benz in Atlanta, MetLife in New Jersey, and Gillette in Massachusetts have felt construction this NFL offseason to ready themselves. Some, like Atlanta, will install their World Cup field months in advance and care for it like an enduring pitch, albeit one that’ll then be removed before the 2026 NFL season because artificial turf can better house the stadium’s many non-sporting events.
Others, though, are planning to install their World Cup fields in early June, and this is where the university research comes in. Sorochan and Rogers settled what they call a shallow pitch profile with a permeable black drainage module, which enables irrigation and Sub Air systems, sitting between thinner sod and the stadium floor. The grass roots tack into a geotextile, and the field’s texture feels pure. You can play on it, Sorochan said, and the ground reaction forces are the same as a square building.
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