Behind the Pitch: How researchers are preparing fields for the 2026 World Cup

The 1994 FIFA World Cup was a special time for American soccer fans. As the first time the nation hosted the tournament, it still stands to this day as the most attended World Cup with an average of more than 68,000 people at each game. 

In that tournament, the U.S. national team scraped by the group stage and narrowly fell in the round of 16 with a 0-1 defeat to eventual champions Brazil.

But for Trey Rogers, Ph.D., a Michigan State University turfgrass management professor and researcher, the real game was happening just below the players’ feet. 

FIFA’s policy is to have all games played on natural grass, and there are strict guidelines to have each venus’s surface maintain high consistency and quality. But for the host venue — the Pontiac Silverdome near Detroit, Mich. — it was the first time World Cup matches would be played indoors, and Rogers was tasked with keeping the grass alive. 

“It’s the onset of a term we called temporary turfgrass fields,” Rogers says. “It was a modular turf field of hexagons, trapezoids and triangles at the ends and sides. The field was built outside in the parking lot, and it was taken inside.” 

Rogers says the technology they developed allowed them to maintain the field outside for a year before moving it into the stadium, and it worked. 

Fast-forward a few decades, and the World Cup is set to return to the U.S. in 2026, this time bringing even more turf challenges. The expansion to 48 teams and adding Canada and Mexico as host nations means that FIFA consistency on real grass becomes much trickier. 

“They’re doing a 48-team tournament in three countries,” Rogers says. “The difference between Vancouver and Mexico City is the same thing as Boston to Dublin, Ireland.”

With multiple different time zones, climatic zones and field conditions in the host venues, FIFA once again approached researchers to find ways to bring the desired aesthetics, predictability and uniformity to their pitches. 

One of those researchers was John Sorochan, a professor of turfgrass science and management at the University of Tennessee. Sorochan was an undergraduate at MSU when he helped Rogers with the ‘94 World Cup, and now he and Rogers are back, trying to build on their successes from 1994. 

“If you think back to ‘94, once we showed that this artificial turf could be put in modules and be playable to a World Cup standard in a very short time — less than a week — it wasn’t long until modular turf started popping up,” Rogers says.

Eight of the 16 venues will need their artificial turf fields replaced by temporary grass pitches, and five of those artificial turf fields are indoors, meaning a strong gameplan is needed to install high-quality and consistent pitches in each of the host stadiums.

“The artificial turf field is going to come out. You start building a field from the concrete floor up, and you have different components that we’ve researched and studied,” Rogers says. “We have a drainage system that’s kind of a plastic grid training system. We use a form of sod that is known in the industry as sod-on-plastic. It’s sod thrown on plastic, it’s very popular in the National Football League and Major League Soccer.”

Backed now with FIFA funding and collaborative help, Rogers says he and Sorochan are looking for every improvement possible. Early test opportunities such as the U.S. hosting the 2025 Club World Cup and a field installation for the Sept. 10 Mexico versus Canada friendly at AT&T Stadium can help them find ways to refine their work, even if it’s not a “full-scale rehearsal.”

And like a true turfgrass professional, Rogers hopes the advancements made for this project trickle down to help the rest of the industry like they did in ‘94, allowing venues to better offer higher quality fields for a variety of purposes. 

“The idea is, can you start to build these temporary fields that a multi-use stadium can simply say, ‘Yes, that’s one of our offerings.’” Rogers says. “One of our offerings is a world-class, temporary, natural turf field. We can provide that for you.

“Right now, you go to watch a friendly game in the summer, they just lay the turf over the top of an artificial surface, and that’s not going to be acceptable for the World Cup. It’s a much more sophisticated system than that.”

And while Rogers’ experience makes him an important figure in the research project, he says none of it would be possible without the help of those around him. 

Specifically, Rogers’ and Sorochan’s work, along with the help of MSU graduate and undergraduate students, which he says is similar to Sorochan’s involvement with the ‘94 World Cup. Rogers hopes they have the same good experience he did back in ‘94 and says that they’ve been great to work with.

“These kids are just fantastic. They’re a joy to work with. Enthusiasm runs abound,” Rogers says. “It’s really been fun, and they deserve a lot of recognition.”