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As we reach the business end of an incredible summer of football, all roads now lead towards New York.

The 2026 World Cup final will be played at MetLife Stadium, a few miles from Manhattan in New Jersey, but there is an irony that the surface staging the biggest event in football is the one across the 16 venues that has attracted the most criticism during the tournament.

“The pitch — I don’t even know if you can call it that,” said France midfielder Adrien Rabiot after their first game on it. “It felt more like an artificial surface. Quite hard and quite rigid.”

You would be forgiven for thinking Rabiot was grappling for excuses after a poor team performance, but his side ran out 3-1 winners against Senegal that day.

Warm temperatures at kick-off meant the pitch was particularly dry in the New Jersey summer heat, which will have been a contributing factor to the playing conditions. Still, Rabiot’s manager was similarly reflective when assessing the surface that will host the World Cup final on Sunday.

“We need to get used to this, for sure,” said France boss Didier Deschamps. “There might be some cement below the grass. You have very short blades of grass here.”

The quality of the playing surface was always going to be one of the biggest challenges for this summer’s World Cup. Striving for uniformity across 16 stadiums is a difficult task at any major international tournament, but the circumstances are different for the United States, Canada and Mexico as host nations.

Only four of those 16 are purpose-built venues for soccer, none of which are in the U.S., with all 11 of their stadiums being primarily built for NFL or multi-purpose use. Only eight have natural grass year-round, meaning the remaining eight have temporary grass installed over the artificial turf to match FIFA’s requirements.

With diversity in climate, altitude, sunlight, and stadium structures (five are indoor/domed), there are many factors to consider. Throw in the 84 training sites and 178 practice pitches, and the scale of the task to provide consistent conditions is vast.

During their preparation for a quarter-final against Spain in Los Angeles, Belgium requested to relocate their training base in that California city after inspections “showed that the quality of the playing surface did not meet the minimum standards required for our training session.”

It is a discussion that has been in the making for over two years.

Pitch quality was a key issue when the United States hosted the Copa America in 2024, with multiple complaints from players and managers. The same was true during last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup, which was also played there.

“The pitches aren’t great at all. It holds up the ball — the ball barely bounces,” Jude Bellingham said after Real Madrid’s win against Pachuca of Mexico at the Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, another venue that usually has a synthetic field, during the latter competition. “It’s tough on the knees as well. Hopefully, there’s someone who will look at that going into the World Cup next year.”

Compared with those two tournaments, there have been fewer complaints about the quality of the playing surfaces this summer. Players have even given credit to the pitches in the early stages of this World Cup.

“They’ve done such a good job to have it in the condition that it’s in,” Australia midfielder Aiden O’Neill said of the Vancouver pitch (BC Place) after their 2-0 victory over Turkey there. “The ball moved well; it wasn’t too hard or too soft. I think they’ve got it perfect, to be honest.”

As The Athletic previously reported, extensive research has been undertaken to reach this point, with a multi-million-dollar project led by FIFA’s senior pitch management manager, Alan Ferguson.

FIFA has its own pitch management team that has partnered with each stadium, with planning going as far back as 2018 and research beginning in 2021. The team collaborated closely with programmes at the University of Tennessee and Michigan State University, led by experts Dr John Sorochan and Dr Trey Rogers III.

The detail FIFA and its collaborators have gone into is to be admired, but — like any academic research — the methodology can be debated. In an era where the popularity of data and statistics in football has soared, those same objective analyses can be applied to pitches.

“FIFA has gone through a process trying to get that consistency, but it is not straightforward — it is a difficult challenge,” says Christian Theil, managing director of turfcoach.“If you put in a temporary field, it is extremely difficult to have it behave the same way as a non-temporary field.”

Turfcoach is an analytics platform that works closely with stadiums across the world to provide data-driven insights into the condition of a pitch.

Working across multiple football competitions such as the Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga, MLS and Liga MX in Mexico, Theil’s team combines technology with agronomy (i.e. the science of soil and crop management) to statistically model the environment and playing conditions of a pitch — including weather, shade, ball-roll speed, and ball bounce. The result is bespoke, real-time guidance on what treatment a playing surface might need.

FIFA’s existing measurement procedure to test the qualitative condition of the field has specific parameters that need to be fulfilled ahead of its use.

As published in their “Quality Programme For Football Turf: Test Manual”, field test positions are located at 19 points across a pitch — with each reading recorded as a snapshot of conditions at the time it was taken.

However, having such a distinct method of measurement can come with its own limitations.

“Firstly, there is a lot of in-field variability — and that is very difficult to capture from just 19 positions,” Theil says. “Secondly, even if the tool is 100 per cent accurate, someone might turn on the irrigation system (i.e. on-pitch water sprinklers) five minutes after the measurement was taken — which changes those values.”

Having that versatility in pitch measurement is also crucial when considering the wide range of conditions across the United States, Canada and Mexico at this World Cup. Specifically, the family of grass used is different, depending on the climate.

In warmer regions, Bermuda grass is favoured for its ability to withstand heat and dry conditions, with the pitches also typically cut shorter due to the higher density of the surface. By contrast, cooler (and indoor) climates will combine Kentucky bluegrass (84 per cent) with perennial ryegrass (16 per cent) — a surface those who play their football in Europe will be more familiar with.

Achieving consistency across both pitch types is a huge challenge, and any differences may simply come down to player preference.

For example, MetLife Stadium uses Bermuda grass, which neither Rabiot nor Deschamps will be as familiar with in their experience of European football.

FIFA did not respond to The Athletic’s request for comment on points made in this article.

The players might be justified in their complaints, but why should fans take interest in the conditions of the pitch? Put simply, it might affect how much entertainment you are getting.

“Because of the weather and the heat, the grass dries out quickly and the game ends up being very slow,” Brazil forward Vinicius Junior told TNT Sports Brazil after their opening group match, a 1-1 draw with Morocco, at MetLife. “We can’t build up a rhythm.”

Norway head coach Stale Solbakken also referenced how that same venue’s turf could affect his side’s playing style.

“We looked at the pitch and it is a bit like artificial grass; short and hard underneath,” Solbakken said before his side’s group game with Senegal. “It seems bad for teams who like to hold possession. Sure, if the pitch is dry, it would be a problem, but tomorrow the forecast is rain, so it should help.”

Climatologically, mid-July is the hottest time of year in New Jersey — with an average high temperature of 87F (31C) — which suggests that Sunday’s final, kicking off at 3pm local time, is expected to be played in particularly dry conditions.

In the same way that analytics has grown at the player or team level, the playing surface is another crucial, yet relatively understudied, factor that can determine the outcome of a game — from the bounce of the ball to the risk of injury.

To borrow a tagline from turfcoach, the pitch is data.

At a tactical level, different pitch conditions are likely to pose challenges for players when judging their actions. Research has shown that ball rolling speed and distance can vary notably depending on the playing surface, meaning that a perfectly weighted pass in Mexico City’s Estadio Azteca might zip off the turf more quickly than one played at Gillette Stadium near Boston, which is over 2,000 miles (over 3,500km) further north and 7,000ft (more than a mile) closer to sea level.

It is difficult to infer causality accurately, but there have been an unprecedented number of errors leading to shots this summer — with a tally of 123 already comfortably more than the 2022 (22) and 2018 (51) editions of the tournament combined.

One notable example was from Iraq defender Zaid Tahseen against Norway at Gillette Stadium, hitting an underweighted backpass to goalkeeper Jalal Hassan — allowing Erling Haaland to storm forward, nip in and score.

Tahseen might ultimately be at fault, but a closer look at the replay suggests the ball slows as it reaches the six-yard box, catching Hassan off guard and forcing him to recalibrate.

When margins are tight on the biggest international stage, a few centimetres could be the difference between victory and defeat.

Thankfully, there have been no notable non-contact injuries that have been attributed to these pitches, but the temporary nature of some surfaces means there is a higher risk — given how they act compared with permanent grass fields.

Causal relationships between pitch conditions and injuries remain under-researched, but a 2019 study did find an association between the grip of football boots and different playing surfaces in terms of injury risk.

Using data to minimise the chance of injury is the ultimate goal among sports scientists in club and international football. Within turfcoach’s platform, Theil highlights the value of optimising decision-making when selecting the best footwear for a given surface.

“The perfect boot is not just about the pitch. It depends on the player, with each having a different foot shape, gait, and injury history,” Theil says. “It also depends on the different positions on the field. All of these factors play a role in terms of what is ideally the correct boot — but if a (non-contact) injury takes place, you want to have that data to understand why.

“Within our platform, when players come in after training, they pick the boots they wore and give feedback. Based on the feedback they have given in previous sessions — alongside our data from the pitch conditions — we can give a recommendation when they next take to the field.

“For example, based on this type of weather, you prefer wearing boot X, Y, or Z. Physios and ground staff also get to see the player feedback. If a player says they were very uncomfortable in their boots, there is a high risk of them getting injured, particularly if it’s an outlier in comparison to the rest of the team.”

FIFA has gone to great lengths to ensure that all 16 stadiums at this World Cup can service all players to the same level, but there are key reasons why we, as fans, should care about the quality of the pitches.

Fewer injuries mean you get to see the best players on the field. An optimal surface means a better spectacle, allowing world-class footballers to craft the best passes, make the sharpest runs and score stunning goals.

Whether you like it or not, it all comes down to the playing surface they’re standing on.

Only now do we have sharper tools to measure their quality.