Spain and Argentina meet at MetLife Stadium on Sunday for the 2026 World Cup final, closing out a tournament that put the New Jersey venue’s grass under a microscope it had never faced before. For years, Giants and Jets fans have pushed ownership to ditch the stadium’s artificial turf. FIFA doesn’t leave that choice up for debate — the sport’s governing body requires natural grass for World Cup matches, full stop. So for the first time, MetLife grew real grass. The reviews have been mixed at best.
Brazil forward Vinícius Júnior said the surface played dry and sluggish after his team’s group-stage draw with Morocco. Speaking to TNT Sports Brazil, he said the heat dried the grass out fast and slowed the game down, making it hard for Brazil to build any rhythm. He added that the team would have to adapt, since he expected every squad to face the same conditions the rest of the way.
France got a similar impression after playing at the venue. Head coach Didier Deschamps called the surface “a special surface — it’s different,” saying players would need time to adjust and speculating there might be something firm underneath the grass. Midfielder Adrien Rabiot was blunter, saying he wasn’t sure the surface qualified as real grass at all and that it felt more like turf — hard and rigid — though he noted every team had to deal with the same conditions.
What Turf Scientists Say Actually Happened
The complaints have a physical explanation, according to experts who’ve studied the pitch. Mike Hahn, a turfgrass researcher at the University of Oregon, told WDHA that MetLife’s shallow, sand-based system is prone to drying out in afternoon heat without enough irrigation, and that the asphalt layer sitting underneath the grass may be contributing to the firmness players have complained about.
Not every expert agrees the field is a problem. Frank Rossi, who leads Agricultural Sciences at Cornell, said MetLife’s firmness readings fall within FIFA’s normal tolerance range and that objective measurements put the pitch in line with other World Cup venues, according to his data. For its part, FIFA has pushed back hard on the criticism. In a statement to The Athletic, the organization said it had spent more than five years researching and testing playing surfaces with turf experts and stadium operators, and that all 16 World Cup venues remain in excellent shape for both playability and player safety. FIFA also addressed the visual complaints directly, saying its turf management team considers every pitch healthy and performing as intended for elite competition, even though some areas of the MetLife surface have drawn comments about their appearance.
Why MetLife Struggled Where Other Venues Didn’t
Weather is part of the story. Growing warm-season Bermuda grass makes sense for a June-July tournament in New Jersey — except the region’s spring didn’t cooperate, and the grass didn’t establish as quickly as planned. Logistics compounded it. A harsh Northeast winter had ruled out MetLife’s planned local New Jersey sod supplier, so crews had to truck sod in from North Carolina, a roughly 12-hour drive, instead of sourcing it close to home the way organizers did at venues like BC Place in Vancouver, which drew praise from players for its grass.
The stadium also isn’t new to this kind of criticism. Complaints about the MetLife pitch surfaced during last summer’s Club World Cup, when the venue was used as a dry run for exactly this scenario.
The Injury Angle
Grass surfaces matter to FIFA in part because of ACL injuries, which are common enough in soccer that the organization runs an injury-prevention program known as FIFA 11+. This World Cup has seen one high-profile case: Belgium’s Amadou Onana tore his ACL in the 21st minute of Belgium’s round-of-16 win over the United States in Seattle, an injury the Belgian federation confirmed came from a collision with USMNT winger Christian Pulisic — not a surface issue. He was ruled out for the rest of the tournament.
It’s worth being careful about drawing a straight line from NFL turf debates to this tournament. The injury-rate data cited around MetLife’s grass push mostly comes from studies of NFL ligament tears across turf and grass fields league-wide, not from World Cup-specific research, and soccer and football place very different stresses on the body. Any comparison between the two sports’ injury rates should be read as a rough gut-check, not a rigorous conclusion.
What This Means for a Permanent Grass Field
NFL players have long preferred grass over turf, both for injury concerns and for the general wear they say turf puts on their bodies. Whether MetLife’s World Cup experiment moves the Giants and Jets any closer to a permanent switch is a separate question — and the stadium’s calendar may be the bigger obstacle. Between concerts, preseason games, and the start of the regular season, MetLife is booked almost solid from August through late September, which makes maintaining a natural grass field year-round a much heavier lift than it is for a stadium hosting football games alone. Any permanent move would also require Jets owner Woody Johnson to sign off and share the cost with the Mara and Tisch families, who own the Giants — not a decision either side has signaled is close.
