Why did designing the World Cup pitches take eight years?

Short Wave

NPR

Nature, Daily News, Science, Life Sciences, News, Astronomy

4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 17 July 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

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Summary

Yamal and Messi aren’t the only stars of the World Cup finals. If you’ve been watching any of the games, you’ve probably stared directly at a huge, unsung hero: the turf. Turf grass science is a real thing, and it’s John Sorochan’s area of expertise. He’s a scientist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and he’s spent the last eight years preparing for the grass pitch the players are scoring on. John had the daunting task of figuring out how to create consistency and uniformity across all the World Cup stadiums. That meant dozens of team base camps and 16 different stadiums where turf had to weather all kinds of conditions – from Mexico City’s high altitude, to Miami’s sweltering heat. Today on Short Wave, we dive into the science behind it all.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
0:06.4	Short wavers, maybe tall wavers.
0:09.0	I don't know who you are.
0:10.2	What's up?
0:10.9	Nate Rod here.
0:11.9	If you've been watching any World Cup games, and how could you not?
0:15.0	Because they're on everywhere.
0:17.2	There's something you probably haven't appreciated enough.
0:20.5	And no, it's not the players.
0:22.7	So my name's John Sorokin. I'm a professor at the University of Tennessee, and I specialize in
0:28.0	turf grass science. Turf grass science. Yes, it's a thing. And for this World Cup,
0:33.5	John had a pretty remarkable mandate from the guy managing the pitches or fields the games are played on.
0:39.2	He wanted consistency, uniformity across the different venues.
0:42.4	Indoor fields and outdoor fields.
0:44.5	The one thing he said is we don't want to have to replace any grass during the tournament,
0:50.7	which means going in and resauding a stadium or even a goal mouth.
0:54.1	We don't want to change any of that.
0:55.8	Meaning the fields had to hold up for 104 matches over six weeks.
1:01.9	16 completely diverse stadiums from Mexico City at really high altitude to the same indoors
1:08.0	in Vancouver at sea level and the same as in tropical Miami. How do we get this to be the same as close to the same indoors in Vancouver at sea level, and the same as in tropical Miami.
1:11.9	How do we get this to be the same?
1:13.5	As close to the same as possible.
	...

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