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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — On Sunday, the world will be watching as Spain take on Argentina for the 2026 FIFA World Cup final.
The match is considered the biggest single sporting event in the world, happening this year at MetLife Stadium in the shadow of New York City. There, the two finalists, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 in the world by FIFA entering the tournament, will play 90 minutes or more to determine who will become world champion.
It is a titanic clash of global superstars which will be played on a natural grass surface, one which may go practically unnoticed by many viewers, but which has been painstakingly developed, grown, installed, and maintained over a considerable time.
The Sporting News explains what the surface for the World Cup final is, how it was developed, who played essential roles in that process, and how it will permanently change the way soccer is played in the United States for the long run.
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What type of surface is the World Cup final pitch?
The field at MetLife Stadium that will be played on for the 2026 FIFA World Cup final is Bermuda grass, which FIFA mandates for all World Cup games.
However, it's not quite as simple as that.
The permanent playing surface at MetLife Stadium is artificial turf, which means FIFA needed to install a temporary grass playing surface before the tournament, a process which took about a month.
Once the Bermuda grass was installed at MetLife Stadium, it was stitched with five percent artificial turf — the process most stadiums at the World Cup followed, although three of them used a pre-stitched carpet which arrived at the stadium with turf already woven in.
Whether stitched (which took three days to complete) or carpeted, this provided reinforcement to the turf to give it additional strength and uniformity.
Below the grass are a number of layers between the grass surface itself and the permanent synthetic surface underneath. At the bottom is a geotextile layer, followed by an aluminum flooring, which was found to be a rigid surface to negate any effects of the turf. Above that is an impermeable layer to protect the synthetic surface, and then an 85-millimeter permavoid drainage layer, on top of which goes the irrigation system and then 8-10 inches of sand which gives a buffer to create as natural a feel to the sod layer on top as possible.
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Where did the grass for the World Cup final come from?
The grass for the MetLife Stadium pitch during the World Cup was grown at Carolina Green Corp in Indian Trail, N.C., just southeast of Charlotte.
They have been providing Bermuda grass sod for soccer pitches in the United States for years, including back in 2024 when The Sporting News profiled the temporary pitch installed at Ohio Stadium for a preseason match between Manchester City and Chelsea.
For that pitch at Ohio Stadium, it took 31 refrigerated semi-trucks to carry the 558 rolls weighing over a ton across the 16-hour trip to Ohio Stadium. FIFA has not given specifics on the transport of this particular pitch, but CBS Sports reports that it is roughly 20 truckloads of sod.
How was the World Cup final pitch developed?
The pitch for the World Cup final has come together after eight years of research, development, growth, and implementation.
"This has been a crazy process to get to where we are today," Dr. John Sorochan, professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Tennessee, who spearheaded one of the two research arms for this project alongside a similar program at Michigan State, told SN.
Dr. Sorochan met FIFA's senior pitch manager Alan Ferguson back in 2016, when he was at the time the head of pitch management at Wembley Stadium as well as for St. George's Park, the official training ground for the English FA. Two years later, with Ferguson having joined FIFA to bring all their pitch management in-house, the two met at a coffee shop in London where the entire project began shortly after the World Cup in Russia had concluded.
"He had the vision then that the World Cup in 2026 was going to be so big," Sorochan said. When Ferguson laid out the scope of the project, and then asked Sorochan to lead the research project that would implement the pitches across the United States, "my jaw dropped to the countertop."
The first thing Sorochan did was contact his former professor of Turfgrass Research at Michigan State, Dr. Trey Rogers.
"In 2019, I'm sitting just outside of Augusta, Ga., where I'd taken some students to visit in August — that's always an interesting thing, it doesn't look quite the same in August as it does in April — and I get a phone call from a guy in Montreal," Rogers told SN, recalling his introduction to the enormous project that he would be locked into for the next seven years.
"He says, 'hey I want to talk to you about coming up and looking at our stadium as a site for the World Cup.' I said 'what World Cup?' He said the North American World Cup that's coming here in 2026.' I said 'no kidding.' Not three days later, John calls."
The two begin collaborating on a project that would, without hyperbole, change the course of athletic playing surfaces in North America.
"I had to kind of retool a bit," Rogers said, having spent much of his time in the profession focused on golf course renovation. "I had to go and find the right graduate students, I had to go and get the right research equipment. Luckily, FIFA was sponsoring all of this."
FIFA did indeed. For years, temporary soccer pitches in the United States — like the one at Ohio Stadium — had been produced by a pretty repeatable formula, but that formula had come under significant fire in recent years for its numerous pitfalls. Not only were these fields ill-equipped to handle multiple matches without breaking down, but they failed to adequately cover the turf underneath to provide the players with a surface that responded similarly to a permanent natural grass field.
So, Dr. Sorochan and Dr. Rogers spent the next seven years, alongside a number of graduate students, researching. "FIFA made a commitment to, how do we make sure we adhere to these strict requirements for World Cup pitches, and how do we make sure that we mitigte any issues of the synthetic turf to either remain below or be removed, to make sure it plays consistently and uniformly?" Sorochan said.
There wasn't one magic bullet. The research team had to develop not just one pitch, but pitches in 16 different geographic environments, at various temperatures, climates, locations, altitudes, and stadiums. Some of the stadiums are outdoor in the beating sun, some are indoor in climate-controlled environments without natural sun, some are at 7,000 feet above sea level, some are in more temperate climates, and some are in areas where rain and thunderstorms are a regular occurrence.
Miami was easy. They got Bermuda grass. Other stadiums played around with mixes of Kentucky bluegrass, perennial ryegrass mix, or other species. They had to get the percentages of the mixes just right.
"The idea here is that Kentucky bluegrass is a great surface for soccer," Rogers said. "They don't use it in England primarily because it's too cloudy. If they could, they would, but it's slow to develop. So knowing that, and knowing we've got to put it in plastic, we thought, 'well what if we add a little bit of ryegrass to speed up the process of how fast we could harvest this?' But we didn't want it to be dominant in ryegrass, so let's research how much."
This research came primarily from Dr. Jackie Guevara, a student at the time in Rogers' program, and now an assistant professor of Plan, Soil, and Microbial Sciences at Michigan State. Guevara's dissertation, titled "Evaluating Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass seeding ratios for sod grown on plastic production," was pivotal in this research process.
Every student in the program played a role in various aspects of the pitch development.
Then came the construction research. "FIFA has the requirements that there has to be a sand root zone, a vacuum ventilation system, a drainage layer, in-ground irrigation, hybrid reinforcement, and grow lights," Sorochan said." So we started looking at each of the 16 stadiums and what's it going to take?"
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Sorting out the instillation process was next, and then finally the management of the playing surface throughout the tournament to keep the pitch fresh while withstanding play.
FIFA built a 5,000 square foot controlled environment simulator dome at the University of Tennessee, outfitted with grow lights and climate control, which allowed researchers to replicate various environments, most notably those inside a dome.
"Dallas has the most games, nine games," Sorochan said, "so we've simulated their schedule and we've applied traffic to grass that's inside and the scenarios that would go on, and see how the grass would hold up."
One difficulty was constructing the pitch so that the response of the ball would not be affected by anything below the field, which has been a significant concern over the past few years, including during international friendlies and the Copa America two years ago, competitions that are not overseen by FIFA.
"FIFA came in and invested in building us a synthetic turf block for us at Tennessee," said Sorochan, who explained that they used this to build various different layers on top to see how the ball would respond. "We looked at, I think, 27 different kinds of build-up scenarios from concert flooring to drainage layers to putting plywood down, all sorts of things to see what we could do to get rid of the trampoline effect."
Sorochan says they focused on two things: the response of the ball, which they wanted to avoid both too much or too little bounce, and then the feel of the surface under an athlete's leg. They developed a "flex testing device" to detect any reverberations or feeling of the synthetic surface below the field.
To some extent, however, the pitch is just simply going to be different than what the players are used to.
"If you think about a player at Manchester City, they start in August and they end in May. If they see a sunny day, that's probably pretty rare for them in England, right? So all of a sudden you come to the United States and you play a friendly in July on a temporary Bermuda grass field in Columbus, Ohio, and it's 80, 90 degrees outside and they water it with hoses.
"If you're in England, it's going to stay wet throughout the entire game, because it's cloudy, humid, damp, wet conditions. Or even in Spain, it's winter time, it's December, the temperatures are cooler, so it doesn't dry out as fast on that surface."
The entire process was a race against time given the years of research they had in front of them.
"If you were graduated on this project at either Tennessee or Michigan State, you were under a big time crunch, because we weren't going to delay the start of the World Cup," Rogers said with in deadpan nature. "We weren't going to do that."
One of the biggest developments that the team produced was how to grow grass into a plastic layer that could then be transported and installed with as little trauma as possible to the root system. "Now you've got a plant that can react very quickly," Rogers said. "It doesn't go into physiological shock when it's cut, doesn't go into physiological shock when it's transplanted, does not have to establish a new root system in order to function. All of those play major roles."
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Criticism of the World Cup final pitch at MetLife Stadium
There have been criticisms of the pitches across the World Cup, but they are not nearly the level of criticisms leveled at temporary pitches across the United States over the past few years.
While pitches at the Copa America garnered criticism for both their durability and extreme variance in performance, the issues presented this summer have been minimal in comparison.
Even now, FIFA officials have been learning on the fly in an attempt to improve the performance of the field. For example, Vinicius Jr. complained about the dryness of the MetLife Stadium pitch early in the group stage after Brazil drew with Morocco, which slowed play down.
Then, as heavy rains battered the field just before Norway vs. Senegal the following week, pitch officials got a front-row view as to just how much water the field could take. Norway head coach Stale Solbakken was thrilled with how the field performed after being rained on.
“The pitch was much better because of the rain," he said after the victory, when asked by SN how the field performed. "The rain made it so the ball doesn’t hang on the foot, it’s going faster, smoother, and that made it so two good teams could play to their strengths. So the pitch, due to the rain, was better. I’m more suspicious if there’s no rain because then it’s dry and short, and then it could be more difficult, but with the rain today, it made the pitch much, much better."
From that point on, FIFA watered the pitch much more, and the complaints about dryness...well...dried up.
France head coach Didier Deschamps was frustrated with the hardness of the MetLife Stadium pitch after defeating Senegal 3-1 in their second group match. "The pitch in New York was really tough — it took a lot out of the players’ muscles," Deschamps said, while France midfielder Adrien Rabiot said it "seemed more like an artificial pitch, hard and rigid."
Germany goalkeeper Manuel Neuer said they’ve "played on better pitches before here" after losing to Ecuador 2-1 at MetLife Stadium, but did not go into specifics.
However, his teammate Denis Undav said before the match that these complaints shouldn't matter. "It doesn’t affect me at all, it’s just put the shoes on, go on the pitch, and go run and play with the ball," Undav said. "That’s it. It’s just football, you know? It doesn’t matter. If the pitch is wet, the ball is a little bit faster, but now you have to play a stronger ball so the ball doesn’t stop. That’s the only adjustment we would have to make.”
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NFL players jealous of World Cup grass pitch
While World Cup participants submit their complaints, athletes in the United States are becoming jealous of what the World Cup has to offer its players.
With 15 of 30 NFL stadiums using artificial turf surfaces — many of which have been covered up by natural grass for FIFA use — NFL players are seeing how the grass pitches are performing and wondering why they don't have something similar for their season.
"The players prefer to play on natural grass. We would love if we could get to that," Jets defensive lineman Harrison Phillips, a member of the NFLPA's executive committee, told ESPN's Jordan Raanan in mid-June before the start of the World Cup. Meanwhile, Giants lineman Jermaine Eluemunor called it "annoying" that they had to watch the World Cup be played on mandated grass surfaces while they play on artificial turf at MetLife Stadium.
Several NFL players orchestrated a social media campaign Friday pushing for the NFL to adopt the World Cup-style pitches. It remains to be seen if NFL owners will be willing to invest in making those permanent.
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