World Cup Will be Played On Rutgers Turfgrass

More than half of the games in the soccer tournament are being played on turfgrass bred by a Rutgers team of experts

While soccer fans watch their favorite teams compete at this summer’s World Cup, Rutgers University’s plant biologists will be looking under the players' cleats—eyeing the lush, green natural turfgrass they created.

Ten of the tournament’s 16 soccer stadiums in the United States, Canada, and Mexico hosting the World Cup will feature cultivated varieties (cultivars) of cool-season natural turfgrasses bred by the university’s team of experts. Rutgers turfgrass is being used in locations from nearby Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field to Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca at an altitude of more than 7,000 feet, to Vancouver’s BC Place domed stadium.

“This is one of our flagship programs that’s world-renowned,’’ said Stacy Bonos, a professor of turfgrass breeding in the university’s plant biology department. “Rutgers grasses are recognized for having good turf quality and being the best overall in multiple different trials all over the country.’’

While Rutgers’ turfgrasses were also in play at this year’s Masters golf tournament— and have been used at Yankee Stadium and the White House, not to mention for countless lawns, parks, and non-professional athletic fields—the spotlight is now on soccer.

FIFA World Cup fields—properly called pitches in the world of soccer—must be able to withstand intense wear and tear from multiple grueling matches, ensuring balls dropped from 2.0 meters bounce up between 0.6 meter and 1.0 meter, and play uniformly across the various host cities’ climates and stadium conditions. 

Michigan State University and University of Tennessee led FIFA’s research into which turfgrasses would perform best at each of the World Cup stadiums. Their experts settled on Rutgers-bred cultivars as their top choice in most cases in consultation with each venue’s groundskeepers and the seed companies, according to Bonos. In addition to Philadelphia, Mexico City, and Vancouver, Rutgers cool-season turfgrasses will be used in Toronto, Boston, Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

Turfgrasses bred for warmer temperatures do not fare as well in chillier temperatures, in the shade, or in low-light areas like under domes compared with their cool-season turfgrass counterparts. MetLife Stadium in the Meadowlands (renamed New York New Jersey Stadium for the tournament) is using a warm-season Bermuda grass variety not bred at Rutgers when the World Cup is played at the New Jersey venue.

James Murphy, an extension specialist in Rutgers’ plant biology department, oversaw the tolerance tests on the university’s turfgrasses that helped confirm their durability for World Cup games. He will be watching the matches, but his focus will be on seeing how well the turfgrasses perform.

“I can’t help but watch what the field does. That’s in my nature. That’s what I do for a living,’’ said Murphy, whose expertise includes turfgrass management. “It’s very rewarding to watch after an event how well the fields hold up. And it’s great to see them recover, so that by the next time they’re played on, they’re in good playing shape.’’

Testing turfgrasses for resistance to stress and then breeding the toughest surviving varieties over successive generations is vital for a successful World Cup, where 104 matches will be played from June 11 to July 19 at 16 venues—with most pitches set to host six or seven games each.

Rutgers’ turfgrasses are tested by a wear machine that whacks the blades with rubber paddles, which are about 12 to 15 inches long, 1 inch wide, and a half-inch thick, and attached in a triangular format to a spinning axle.

“It spins around and paddles away at the turf and kind of wears and tears the grass,’’ explained Murphy, noting the testing is done at a 206-acre Rutgers research farm in Freehold and a far smaller on-campus farm in North Brunswick. “It does dent the surface a little bit, like the cleat on an athlete’s shoe.’’

To get the most wear-tolerant turfgrasses possible that succeed in testing, professor Bonos and other plant biologists intercross the plants hardiest to the stress, repeating the gene cycles over and over again.

“We sort of speed up natural selection in that way,’’ said Bonos.

Tuckahoe Turf Farms in Hammonton, roughly 70 miles south of Rutgers–New Brunswick, grows sod on 900 acres, including their registered trademark Game Day Sod. This turfgrass contains a mix of Blue Note, Bolt, and Legend Kentucky bluegrass varieties—all developed at Rutgers—that was put down at Gillette Stadum near Boston in late March and at Lincoln Field in Philadelphia in early May, said Allen Carter, CFO of Tuckahoe Turf Farms.

“We maintain it here on the farm just as if it was at a stadium. So as soon as we unroll that carpet, they can play on it,’’ said Carter, who also heads the New Jersey Farm Bureau. “Our rolls are four-feet wide and approximately 40-feet long and they weigh almost 2,000 pounds. So when we put them in, they’re not going anywhere.’’

Rutgers began its turfgrass breeding program in 1962 under C. Reed Funk (1928-2012), whose pioneering work included development decades ago of an earlier cool-season turfgrass that became the standard on European soccer fields.

Overall, Rutgers turfgrass varieties comprise between 35% to 40% of the world’s grass seed production, according to Bonos, with the university conducting research on 10 cool-season turfgrass species. These cultivated varieties include Bentgrass, which is used on golf greens because it can be mowed below 1/10th of an inch.

The university’s team works with about 25 seed companies worldwide, licensing the varieties, and recouping royalties from the commercial sales that help cover the program’s expenses and ongoing research.

Rutgers’ efforts through the decades have helped boost the sector’s economic growth, with the university’s most recent analysis determining the turfgrass industry contributed $4.9 billion to New Jersey’s economy and generated 59,159 jobs in 2019.

“Seeing Rutgers turfgrasses on the world stage is very rewarding because it validates the mission of the program that was initiated over 60 years ago and the research that we do each day, which is to develop the best quality turfgrasses that perform well under many stresses,’’ Bonos said.