MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford began installing the pitch for the 19 July final on 6 May. 600 rolls of Tahoma 31 bermudagrass, grown for ten months at Carolina Green Turf Farm outside Charlotte, were trucked north in 20 refrigerated loads. The sub-base, in order of depth, is 18 to 24 inches of sand, Permavoid permeable cloth, a vacuum-and-ventilation layer, more sand, then the grass. NJ Transit's MetLife mobility plan and FIFA's hybrid-grass mandate sit on top of an operation the venue had ten weeks to assemble. If the Tahoma 31 fails to root in time, the 19 July final is played on a contingency surface nobody has tested at scale. 1
The technical challenge has no tournament precedent at scale. NRG Stadium in Houston, which is domed, is shipping refrigerated grass from Colorado and using LED grow lights from the Netherlands to maintain the pitch between matches; 8 of the 16 venues are converting artificial surfaces to Hybrid grass in a single window. The mechanism is straightforward and unfamiliar to most US sports operators: bermudagrass goes dormant under twelve hours of natural light a day, which is exactly what an indoor venue offers. NRG's Dutch grow lights keep the pitch alive between the 14 June first match and the venue's last.
At Estadio Banorte in Mexico City, renamed from Estadio Azteca after Banorte purchased the naming rights in March 2025 , photographs taken near publication date show seat installation still incomplete in the upper sections and new red membrane structures that were not in the original renovation specification . Mexican officials acknowledged to The Athletic that "renovation progress has not matched early projections". 2 Banorte hosts the 11 June opener for an expected 87,000 attendance, and FIFA has still not been given full possession of a stadium that takes the tournament's first kick.
