The largest soccer event in the world is about to hit North America. But before the fans fill the stadiums, tons of advance planning goes into preparing a field for the FIFA World Cup. We know how to care for a normal lawn, but to get a sense of what it takes to maintain a pro pitch (what they call the field in soccer), we talked to a professional field maintenance team in nearby Philadelphia to find out what’s involved in meeting FIFA’s regulations.

During the tournament, which takes place from June 11 to July 16, 2026, official matches are held in NFL stadiums. But each of the 48 participating teams also has a separate field for practice. As it turns out, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) is holding its base camp at Subaru Park, home of Major League Soccer’s Philadelphia Union team. It’s located about 20 minutes from Philly (and not too far from our office). It’s the park staff’s job to keep the regular season running while accommodating the needs of their guests.

“In the height of the summer, we mow six days a week,” says Mark Mello, director of turf management. His staff of five full-time employees and part-time help isn’t just handling one field, but a total of 92 acres, including practice pitches and the landscaping around the stadium. “Sometimes we’ll be mowing even two times in one day if we have to,” Nate Moore, manager, sports turf, explains, saying that mowing is highly dependent on the weather, as well as the team’s schedule.

Of course, keeping the grass healthy and cut within regulation height ranges is crucial, but field maintenance teams pride themselves on aesthetics. This most notably comes from cutting patterns like striping—the method of angling the grass in one direction or another, giving the illusion of wide, contrasting lines, checkerboard patterns, or other creative designs.

All professional leagues have different striping regulations that field maintenance teams have to adhere to. “We have [MLS] rules that we have to follow on what [the pitch] looks like,” Mello says, adding that it also serves a practical purpose. “The referees and the linesmen sometimes use the lines to determine if [players] are offside. So they’re using the grass to monitor the game.”

“FIFA has a different mowing pattern that they want to see,” he continues. “They want to see the stripes interact in a certain way.” For example, for international matches, FIFA mandates that striping appear horizontally—parallel to the end lines—so viewers at home see a consistent pattern across games. This has to be consistent for practices, too. So even though Subaru Park isn’t an official game venue, the field maintenance crew must prepare the pitch for the Ivory Coast to practice on just as they would for an official FIFA match.

There’s a variety of equipment used to maintain the field at Subaru Park. Gas-powered machines are still used for some jobs, but not nearly as much as they used to be. These days, much of the cutting gear is all-electric. Not only does this save on fuel costs but on maintenance, too. “Internal combustion engines, hydraulic systems, etc.—these are all failure points,” explains Mello, who is in charge of maintaining the equipment. With electric motors, he says, “the only thing I have to focus on is the quality of cutting.”

Some of the biggest machines used are the Jacobsen Eclipse 360 Elite Lithium Reel Mower and the SLF1 Elite. Also commonly used on golf courses, these large automated reel mowers feature blades of hardened, high-manganese carbon alloy steel to get the precise, tight cut needed for professional sports—at Subaru Park, they cut their pitch to seven-tenths of an inch. Professional mowers like these give a great range of cutting options compared with consumer-grade mowers that typically cut from one to four inches and use single blades made of basic carbon steel.

But to get the job of striping done right, the team uses a Dennis G860 mower. This 34-inch gas-powered mower uses verticutting (where rapidly spinning, vertically oriented blades slice directly into a lawn) that has numerous benefits, including keeping the turfgrass thick, brushing (which helps the grass blades stand upright), and swapping in and out different types of rollers. Using several of these machines at once to help angle the grass in different directions helps the turf team create the striped and checkerboard patterns many fans will find familiar.

Another technology that aids the team, notes Moore, is GPS-enabled equipment, such as fertilizer sprayers and line-painting machines. “A sprayer [for example] can be GPS-powered now, so you really don’t have to worry about accidentally overlapping your spray too much and creating chemical burn [in the grass],” he says. He also describes how they use GPS in the line-painting machines, which makes quick work of that job. One line painter is completely robotic, in fact, creating field lines and logos all on its own. “It saves so much time, so you can then focus on the detail work for other aspects of your fields or campus,” Moore says.

Even with those technological advances, field maintenance is a lot of work, but also a lot of love for the job. “I always wanted to try and replicate what they did in my yard at home,” he remembers. Moore still considers the golf course to be the pinnacle of turf management, but credits it as inspirational. “We translate that as much as we can into [our] sports world,” he says, adding, “Seeing something you prepared on national TV, it’s a pretty unique feeling.”