Pondering big football doings on the horizon…

First, an aside: A long-ago Dallas Cowboys star running back, Duane Thomas, when informed that having starred in the Super Bowl must have been “like going to the moon,” marveled in response, “You been to the moon, man?” Thomas’ reply to assertions that the Super Bowl was the “ultimate game” was similarly restrained. “If it’s the ultimate game,” he said, “how come they’re playing it again next year?”

So, with all due respect to the upcoming Super Bowl, America’s most-watched television event and cultural benchmark, the topic here is the football competition paramount in the eyes of most Earthlings: Soccer’s quadrennial World Cup tournament. And, interestingly, how that event’s return in 2026 to these shores is an example of retrofitting international expectations—physically as well as enthusiastically—into American mores.

Word has just come down that the World Cup championship final will be played on July 19, 2026 at the home stadium of American football’s two New York teams, the Giants and the Jets, in the New Jersey Meadowlands. This is a big deal, and more evidence that football—sorry, soccer—continues to be melded into the U.S. entertainment fabric.

We are well past the time when most of us in The Colonies reflected the great sportswriter Frank Deford’s perception that “USA” stood for “Uninterested in Soccer A-tall.” The 2026 World Cup essentially is guaranteed to set records for attendance and profit, in part because the tournament will be expanded to 48 participating teams, up from 32 in the last seven iterations. For the first time, three nations—the United States, Canada and Mexico—will share hosting duties, with the U.S. getting 78 of the tournament’s 104 matches.

And this time, 32 years since the U.S. staged the 1994 World Cup, the 11 U.S. stadiums in use will feel far less like mongrel soccer facilities, now better equipped to convert their gridirons to pitches to meet global requirements with widened playing surfaces and grass floors.

American football fields, Yank officials had to be reminded back in ’94, are 120 yards long and 53.3 yards wide, while soccer matches are played out on a 115- by- 75-yard layout. On grass; not artificial turf. Back then, before MetLife Stadium replaced Giants Stadium as New York metro’s primary football theatre, officials proposed what sounded like growing hair on a bald man’s head.

The idea was to construct a grass playing field on an elevated platform suspended by a scaffolding almost 12 feet above the permanent floor and extending six or seven rows into the Giants Stadium stands.

By the time World Cup sites officially were awarded then, the goofy platform idea had been ditched and great pallets of sod were trucked in from a North Carolina farm and placed over the fake turf. Likewise, grass was brought from a farm in California to temporarily cover the artificial stuff in the Pontiac Silverdome outside Detroit. (There was a lot of slipping and sliding on that grass inside the roofed Silverdome during the opening game there.)

These days, stadiums routinely cover their plastic grass with the real stuff to hold major soccer events. A Rhode Island outfit—Kingston Turf Farms—advertises having installed sod over the artificial surface for years at MetLife Stadium: “We bring in a crew to truck the specialty sod in, transport the sod to the field and install the sod over specialized turf protection layer…to transform an artificial playing surface to a natural grass surface in a 24-hour period,” Kingston Turf Farms broadcasts on its website.

And to make their field wider to meet soccer standards, MetLife officials plan to remove 1,740 seats, estimating a decrease in capacity from the 83,367 attendees at an October Giants-Jets Game to 74,895.

Of the other 2026 World Cup stadiums in the United States, those in Arlington, Tex.; Atlanta, Foxborough, Mass.; Houston, Inglewood, Calif.; Seattle and Vancouver also will cover their artificial turf with grass. (“Natural grass,” as the often-used redundancy has it.) And several stadiums are expected to figure out some way to widen their playing surfaces.

When international soccer officials granted the United States its first World Cup in 1994, it came with the stipulation that this country would establish an elite professional soccer league and, beginning in 1996, Major League Soccer materialized. And one consequence of that creation was the new league’s rejection of hybrid football/soccer venues. By 1999, the first “soccer-specific” stadium—with a wider field of grass—was opened in Columbus, Ohio and, of the 26 MLS teams now based in the United States, 22 of them compete in such arenas.

Such stadiums, by the way, were the brainchild of Lamar Hunt, an original founding investor in MLS. And a real football guy, however you define “football.” Hunt was a principal founder of the American Football League and of the charter member Dallas Texans. Who became the Kansas City Chiefs, beneficiaries of the 1966 AFL/NFL merger avidly pursued by Hunt.

The same Chiefs, of course, now attempting to win a big game that Lamar Hunt was first to call the “Super Bowl.”