Unlike the U.S men’s national team or any other of the 48 squads participating in the 2026 World Cup, the newly installed pitch at MetLife Stadium will not get any tune-up matches before the start of one of the globe’s biggest sporting events.
FIFA officials were on hand Thursday to show off the new grass being laid down in the Meadowlands for the summer tournament, a process that began on Wednesday and was expected to go late into Thursday night.
But senior pitch manager David Graham said the first time that someone steps on the field will be “the first match of New York New Jersey.”
“And it will be completely fine,” he said while showing off the new grass field being put down at the home of the Jets and Giants.
The first match at MetLife Stadium kicks off on June 13 when Brazil faces Morocco in the group stage.
Installation of the grass pitch — being placed above the turf field that typically occupies the stadium — is a two-day process that includes 14 trucks on-site.
The grass was grown at Carolina Green Turf Farm in North Carolina.
The farm is also providing the grass pitch for Arrowhead Stadium and several practice facilities being utilized by national teams during the World Cup.
The process to grow the grass takes from eight to 10 months.
Graham said there is an “extensive program in place” to protect the grass between its installation and the start of the World Cup.
“We’ve got our processes in place where we’ve got vacuum ventilation, we’re going to do the hybrid reinforcement this weekend,” he said. “It’s quite an extensive program. We’d like the weather to be a bit warmer so the grass would grow, obviously, but it’s a system that we normally take six to eight weeks, and we repeat, repeat, repeat through the end of the tournament.”
As crews worked diligently to install the pitch in East Rutherford, it was reported that NJ Transit will be reducing the cost of train tickets to World Cup matches at MetLife Stadium.
It was originally announced that a round-trip ticket from Manhattan to MetLife would cost $150, but now it’s been dropped to $105, which is still more than an 800 percent markup from a regularly priced ticket.
The costly nature of the World Cup has been a topic of discussion that even President Donald Trump weighed in on during a phone conversation with The Post late Wednesday.
Trump ripped the extravagant game ticket prices and told The Post’s James Franey that, “I wouldn’t pay it either, to be honest with you.”
