A definition of privilege is watching the World Cup without needing to know anything about the rotational resistance of grass or its optimum root depth. Take time and give thanks that you’ve never before heard the phrase “normalised difference vegetation”.

Leave all this knowledge in the domain of the Fifa employees and freelancers whose job it is to prepare and maintain the pitches being used at the 16 venues of this World Cup across Mexico, Canada and the United States.

Among these people is Dundalk’s Greg Whately, a University College Dublin horticulture graduate now spreading some turf-based wonkery beneath the feet of the world’s greatest footballers.

Whately’s work in Ireland has included consulting at Croke Park and he has been seconded to Boston for the summer as the pitch manager of New England Patriots’ Gillette Stadium. Or, to use its official 2026 World Cup title, the Boston Stadium. Fifa have blandly rechristened all tournament stadiums, which is why the historic Azteca is named in tournament literature as the Mexico City Stadium.

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Whately’s primary job is to ensure the surface in Boston meets all Fifa’s finicky criteria, which have been drawn up under the same principle of uniformity. “It has to be consistent,” he says. “Because teams are expected to play on multiple surfaces on multiple venues, they have to get the same product when they go to each of them. I can fully relax when I have seen a player go flat out and then stop or do a sharp turn at full pace. They have to be able to perform at their best, and to do that they need confidence without worrying about what’s underneath them.”

The criteria were developed following eight years of research, funded by Fifa to the tune of about €4.4 million. Researchers experimented with different types and lengths of grass, on which they fired footballs from machines to measure their bounce and into which they slammed a mechanised football boot to test the surface’s spring.

They found their optimum measurements and prescribed different diets to different venues depending on their climate, all to ensure a football would bounce at the same height in Mexico as Toronto. The pitches in hotter climates were prescribed a warm-season grass, known as Bermuda, to be cut to 16 millimetres. Boston and other cooler venues have sowed a mixture of Kentucky bluegrass and perennial ryegrass that has to measure 23 millimetres on match day.

These are grasses used in most of the major leagues of Europe and South America, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Lionel Messi, Erling Haaland and Kylian Mbappé have hit the obsessively tended ground running.

Boston hosts seven games to the quarter-final stage, and work began in February once the Patriots went to the Super Bowl. Fifa ripped up the artificial turf and dug up 10 inches of gravel sitting beneath it, replacing it with a mixture of sand and porous ceramic before laying the grass on top. They also removed some seating around the pitch’s perimeter to widen the playing surface by 20 yards.

At half time during Iraq vs Norway the sprinklers malfunctioned. 🤯 pic.twitter.com/a1ETBqhgGV— World Cup HQ (@WorldCup26HQ) June 17, 2026

Whately’s work extends to match day, where he must react to any surprises or calamities. While inspecting a goal at half-time of Boston’s second game between Norway and Iraq, Whately turned around to see a sprinkler had gone rogue, its head popping off and flooding a section of the pitch to the point that a patch of sand rose to the surface.

The grounds team quelled the sprinkler, shovelled up the sand, and the second-half resumed on time. Whately decided not to risk watering the pitch again, and the Norway manager Stale Solbakken complained after the game that the pitch had dried out and become slow.

Whately is used to high-pressure situations, having spent a short stint as a groundskeeper at Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio, where he had to respond to founder Jack Nicklaus’s constant demands to make the course more challenging for competing PGA Tour professionals at the annual Memorial Tournament.

“We had some late nights, and changed the full tee complex of the 18th hole midseason, which was unheard of,” Whately says.

Working at multiple World Cups, European Championships and Uefa club finals has taught him the stranger consequences of growing grass that others call hallowed. He has been frequently asked by fans for grass clippings of famous pitches on which he has worked. “People don’t grasp that as soon as I dig it out of the ground, it will die pretty quickly.”

He is not allowed to take requests from competing teams to tweak a pitch in their favour, with the schedule for the watering of the pitch explained a day in advance. That said, the four-quarter nature of this World Cup offers Whately and his colleagues a new, mid-game opportunity to further slick the surface if they deem it necessary.

This raises the question whether we have all been too harsh on Fifa’s contentious new hydration breaks – perhaps the water is not just for the players, but also for the grass. Maybe the price of favourable rotation resistance is eternal vigilance.

Source: The Irish Times