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While soccer fans watch their favorite teams compete at this summer’s World Cup, Rutgers University’s plant biologists will be looking under the players’ cleats—eyeing the lush, green natural turfgrass they created.
Ten of the tournament’s 16 soccer stadiums in the United States, Canada, and Mexico hosting the World Cup will feature cultivated varieties (cultivars) of cool-season natural turfgrasses bred by the university’s team of experts. Rutgers turfgrass is being used in locations from nearby Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field to Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca at an altitude of more than 7,000 feet, to Vancouver’s BC Place domed stadium.