Why did designing the World Cup pitches take eight years?
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The last time Antonio Mays Sr. heard from his son, it was in a note the 16-year-old left in the family's garage. He told me he was going to make me proud. Antonio Jr. left home to join a protest in Seattle. A week later, he was shot and killed there. I need some arrest made, justice for my son. Listen to We Keep Us Safe on the Embedded podcast from NPR. You're listening to Shortwave from NPR.
Short wavers, maybe tall wavers. I don't know who you are. What's up? Nate Rod here. If you've been watching any World Cup games, and how could you not? Because they're on everywhere. There's something you probably haven't appreciated enough. And no, it's not the players.
So my name's John Sorokin. I'm a professor at the University of Tennessee, and I specialize in turfgrass science.
Turf, grass, science. Yes, it's a thing. And for this World Cup, John had a pretty remarkable mandate from the guy managing the pitches or fields the games are played on.
He wanted consistency, uniformity across the different venues. Indoor fields and outdoor fields. The one thing he said is, we don't want to have to replace any grass during the tournament. which means going in and re-sodding a stadium or even a goal mouth. We don't want to change any of that.
Meaning the fields had to hold up for 104 matches over six weeks.
16 completely diverse stadiums from Mexico City at really high altitude to the same indoors 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 as possible?
Why did turfgrass science become central to this World Cup project?
After a big gulp, my sleepless nights for the next eight years began.
So today on the show, the science that's gone into the playing fields for this year's World Cup and what it might mean for a community park near you. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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All right, John, I'm kind of tempted to call you Mr. Turf. Do your friends call you that?
No, you don't want to know what my friends call me, but yeah, that's okay.
How do you get into something like this? You've been doing this for 30 years.
Yeah, by accident. I started off at the University of Calgary thinking I'd be a lawyer in the oil and gas industry, and I did not like it. So I got a job on a golf course, and I fell in love with it, and I transferred to Michigan State University. And that's when the World Cup was here. I started working on that in the late fall of 92 as a student. And we got to go on the roof of the Silverdome when the whole tournament was over and jump on it like a trampoline. It was air inflated, right? And then we laid down and you're like, holy, I'm a couple hundred feet above the ground. I started looking at the field and you could see after a month indoors with no sunlight, it was showing its wear. And I was like, how do I make that better?
What mandate did FIFA give for uniformity across 16 diverse stadiums?
How would we make this all uniform? And so I went on and my PhD was growing grass indoors for dome stadiums and now doing it, you know, 32 years later for the 2026 world cup.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:41
2
Why did turfgrass science become central to this World Cup project?
1:41–4:14
3
What mandate did FIFA give for uniformity across 16 diverse stadiums?
4:14–12:17
4
How did John Sorochan’s career path lead him to World Cup pitch design?
12:17–15:42
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Short Wave
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