EAST LANSING, Mich. – When the World Cup officially kicks off this week in 16 stadiums across North America, all the beautiful grass you see will have been cultivated thanks to the work of a professor and students at Michigan State University.
“The athlete in any sport on grass has to have confidence that they can perform,” Dr. John “Trey” Rogers, a turf-grass management professor at MSU said. “If they start worrying about their footing or start worrying about how a ball’s going to bounce, that’s when we start to have the problem.”
“I do a lot of teaching here and I still will tell you that the students, as they gravitate toward turf grass, what really turns them on is working on a golf course or an athletic field that’s what gets their juices flowing,” he said.
A tall, soft-spoken man with a deep Southern drawl, Rogers has been at MSU since 1988. He has grown to become one of the most respected people in his field.
He first became interested in turfgrass management when he worked at a golf course as a teenager in his native Arkansas. He eventually got degrees from the University of Arkansas and a doctorate from Penn State University.
“This Grass Gets Worked Out Every day.”
Rogers will mark 38 years at the Michigan State this fall. He teaches classes at the sprawling Hancock Turfgrass Research Center, which is just south of the main MSU campus.
It is 56 acres of meticulously grown, well-manicured grass. Outside of the office, are grassy areas that resemble the greens on a golf course.
The “recipe” for that grass is what the world’s best association football – what soccer is called around the world – teams will be playing on during the 2026 World Cup.
“The grass that’s right in our foreground here is the same grass that is likely in your yard,” Rogers said. “It’s just this grass gets intensively managed.”
“It’s a little bit like when you look at somebody and you say, ‘man, they’ve really been lifting weights,’ he said. “They didn’t get it by going to the gym once a month. They got it by going to the gym every day. And this grass gets worked out every day too.”
Rogers was contacted by FIFA in 2019 about creating the grass for this year’s tournament. It is not the first time he has worked with FIFA.
He was first contacted in 1992 to develop a way to get grass inside of the Pontiac Silverdome for play in the 1994 World Cup. It would mark the first time a World Cup match was played in an indoor stadium.
“We did everything,” Rogers said. “We built the field; We installed the field; we maintained the field, in addition to doing all the research here on the campus.”
“This time, because it’s such a large event, we’ve just been doing the research that was necessary to provide the recipes,” he said. Rogers, along with three MSU research students and a group of researchers from the University of Tennessee, helped cook up the proverbial “recipes” for the grass.
“To get research exactly what you need for something as big as the World Cup, it takes a lot of listening,” Ryan Bearss, a PhD student at MSU, said. He is one of the researchers who has worked on the World Cup grass.
“Beyond Trey being an amazing mentor to all of us, his past experience, I would say his research has really helped shape the direction of the project that we’ve been trying to go at Michigan State,” he said.
One of the students who worked with Rogers 34 years ago was John Sorochan, who is leading the Volunteers’ side of the program now.
“It’s quite an honor,” Rogers said. “I give a lot of credit to John Sorochan, because they came to him because he had a relationship with FIFA and specifically Alan Ferguson, and he came back and he said, ‘I’m going to need some help.’ This is a big one. And it really was.”
“It’s Ready To Play…”
It was the work in 1994 that developed a system to make turfgrass portable, so it could be transported and reused from stadium-to-stadium.
That technology has now become the industry standard as numerous NFL stadiums across the United States and stadiums around the world use and import turfgrass.
As for this year, the turfgrass will be a mixture of Kentucky Bluegrass and perennial ryegrass. It’s grown on sod farms across the U.S. and transported to the stadiums.
The farms will plant the engineered grass into a sod system that they call sod on plastic, where they take your soil and sand, spread it out over a plastic sheet, and then put seed down into it. Once the roots grow through and hit the plastic, it’s strong enough to harvest.
“You can’t tear this very easily,” Rogers said while holding a square of sod the size of a small cake. “More importantly, you can’t hurt it.”
“When you deliver it to the stadium,” he added, “it’s ready to play.”
When the games begin across the United States, Canada, and Mexico this week, it will be played on a surface that has literal roots at MSU. Rogers says that he hopes his work on turfgrass doesn’t just help professional athletes, but also high school and college athletes.
True to his Arkansas roots, he remains humble about his work and would rather kick the credit to the crew that does the heavy lifting.
“The students and the staff is where the hard work goes and there’s no question that you’ve got to be very proud of them,” Rogers said. “There’s another group that I’ll be very proud and that’s the sod farmers across North America because of what they’ve delivered. They’re the unsung hero.”