Inside FIFA's huge engineering effort to build a World Cup pitch at MetLife Stadium and across North America

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EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — The unmistakable sound of several leaf blowers going at once rang out inside the bowl of MetLife Stadium, now decorated with signage bearing the words “New York New Jersey,” sans punctuation but with the implication that the building is one horribly labeled place, rather than a state with a normal name. The most important sign that a World Cup is mere weeks away had finally arrived, and it required some dusting off.

The installation process for the grass pitch at the venue, which will host eight World Cup games, including the July 19 final, began on Wednesday and will stretch out for a few weeks with the plan of being perfectly playable when Brazil and Morocco open Group C play on June 13. Roughly 20 truckloads of Tahoma 31 bermudagrass had finally made the journey from Carolina Green Turf Farm outside of Charlotte, N.C. to suburban New York, roughly 10 months after the growth process began – and about a decade after FIFA’s pitch team began conducting their research into a World Cup that would be played as far north as Vancouver and as far south as Mexico City.

“When it comes to delivering a field for the World Cup or for a tournament, to have those numbers, have all that thought process, it’s been very beneficial,” senior pitch manager David Graham, who has oversight over the grass at all 16 tournament venues, mentioned. “I couldn’t do my job without any of that.”

The team overseeing MetLife Stadium’s pitch officially got to work around 5 p.m. on Wednesday and worked until 2 a.m. to lay out the grass, resuming work at 11 a.m. on Thursday to finish the initial part of the installation process. The bermudagrass is the last layer of several at the stadium — the original infrastructure for the venue’s artificial turf surface is still at the bottom, but around two feet of sand, an entire irrigation system and a vacuum ventilation operation separate it from the grass World Cup-bound players will compete on. For the time being, the field is dotted with several HVAC systems that will pump hot air when it’s cold and cold air when it’s hot to assist growth during the installation process. Next week, a giant sewing machine on wheels will stitch all the parts together to create a cohesive playing surface.

Graham mentioned Thursday that the project was on schedule and is underway in just about every U.S. World Cup venue, where grass fields grown elsewhere will replace the surfaces in NFL stadiums. It comes months after FIFA had to make a major change for MetLife Stadium specifically — grass from New Jersey-based Tuckahoe Turf Farms was originally supposed to fill the arena, but a brutal winter that saw feet of snow fall meant the grass was unusable. FIFA had opted to grow plenty of extra grass at the 11 farms they used across the U.S., Mexico and Canada and so the bermudagrass grown in North Carolina would suffice just fine.

“The grass here currently is a warm-season grass with a natural growth habit for certain temperatures,” Graham mentioned of the grass from Carolina Green, which suited MetLife Stadium just fine. “As the tournament goes on in New York, New Jersey, we expect it to get better and better.”

Continuity for 104 World Cup games

FIFA will chiefly use two types of grass during the World Cup, essentially dividing the venues by warm-weather climates and cool-weather climates. The bermudagrass at MetLife Stadium is for the warmer host cities, while Kentucky bluegrass oversown with ryegrass will be used in domed stadiums and cooler areas like Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., where Tuckahoe’s grass still made the trip. The installation dates were earlier for the grass in cooler climates, but the process was still the same, and so will the feel, FIFA’s pitch team hopes.

“We have extensively researched all venues, all scenarios, indoor, outdoor, transition zones, the three countries that are involved. FIFA has actually has put a lot of time, effort into the research program,” Graham mentioned. “Light research – so in terms of the dome stadiums, for example, FIFA has the FIFA shade building at Tennessee University, which is solely dedicated to growing grass indoors, different light requirements, so on. Where there’s been the sod on plastic, which is a North American accomplishment and we’re just refining with the shallow stitching, the conventional stitching, so we’ve played with different depths in terms of being temporary, being permanent so it’s had a lot of great things and the future of the research is water consumption, just I would say environmental pressures, warm season, cool season, snow, sun, climate.”

It is through that research that Graham and his colleagues have the specifications needed to plan for consistency from stadium to stadium, down to the length each blade of grass needs to be cut. The pitch team has also planned for a long, summertime tournament and has a process in place to ensure the field is just as ready on June 13 as it is on July 19.

“We’ve got vacuum ventilation, we’re going to the hybrid reinforcement this weekend, so there’s quite an extensive program.” he mentioned. “We’d like the weather to be a little bit warmer so the grass can grow, obviously, but it’s a process that normally takes six to eight weeks and we repeat, repeat, repeat until the end of the tournament.”

FIFA’s scheduling of the semifinals at AT&T Stadium in the Dallas suburbs and Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, rather than their Club World Cup schedule to host two semifinals and the final at MetLife Stadium a year ago, will also play a role in preserving the pitch’s quality for July 19. It is not the only difference between this summer’s tournament and the Club World Cup – FIFA has a runway of weeks to months to install their pitches, whereas they had roughly two weeks to do the whole process a year ago. Those surfaces received complaints from players but Graham mentioned the Club World Cup fields performed as expected.

“I believe the field was ready,” Graham mentioned about the pitches at last year’s tournament. “All the numbers that we’d done for testing was in the range for FIFA and the way it was planned. The difference for this tournament from last year’s tournament – we had two weeks with the venue to put in the installation so it wasn’t the pitch that you’re seeing here. The installation was completely different. That was a temporary overlay field. It didn’t have an irrigation system. This has a fully automated system.”

Time, he believes, should make all the difference.

“This pitch will be in longer than the duration of last year’s tournament before we kick a ball,” he mentioned. “It’s only just that the best players in the planet hopefully get the grass in the planet and we’re trying to achieve that.”