As the top soccer players in the world head to North America for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup and FIFA World Cup 26, the pitch management team at FIFA has rigorously prepared training pitch locations for the team base camps and venue-specific training sites. The combined number of pitches for the upcoming tournaments will total more than 70 for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup and more than 100 for FIFA World Cup 26. For insight into the preparation required for all of the sites,SportsField Management magazine recently spoke with Weston Appelfeller, CSFM, FIFA 26 senior manager, training pitch management.
SportsField Management (SFM): Please provide an overview of the base camps and training sites, as well as how you are preparing for something of this size and scope.
Weston Appelfeller, CSFM: A team base camp is where a club [for the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup] or a country [for FIFA World Cup 26] will train during the time that they’re here. It will be their home base, and where they live for two weeks. The venue-specific training sites are where they will go on match day minus one. They will train for two or three weeks at their home base camp, and then they will rotate over to the venue-specific training site the day before the match, play the match, and then go back to their team base camp.
For a tournament that has 48 different countries playing in it, we need at least 48 of those. Add in the referee base camp, and you have 49. Then you have all the stadiums across three different countries, and each one of those needs to have one to two venue-specific training sites.
We also need to have 30% more of the team base camps for the clubs and countries to choose from. That’s where we get somewhere in the range of 100 different sites that we are putting forth. To get those, however, we have evaluated more than 200 sites and what they offer in terms of grass, drainage, soil, equipment, staff, etc. All of those factors come into play as we put our best foot forward.
SFM: When looking at those sites, are you evaluating professional venues, colleges, high school or a mix of sites? Also, what type of existing infrastructure are you looking for?
Appelfeller: Yes, we’ve looked at everything from private high schools to Division I college to NWSL, USL and MLS facilities. We have looked at different sizes – some are two pitches, some are four pitches – and we determined which ones are the best of each site that we would want to use. There are a lot of factors that go into picking a good training site. Having a good pitch is one thing, but having good locker rooms, a good weight room, a really nice hotel nearby, and having something for the players to do in the city all factor into one big-picture package that we send out to the clubs and countries. The training pitches are extremely important, but they are just a small piece of the whole puzzle.
SFM: Do the base camps have to be in a certain proximity to where those teams will ultimately play? And what are the logistics for the venue-specific training sites?
Appelfeller: The venue-specific training sites are within probably 20 minutes of the stadiums. For the team base camps, clubs or federations will choose those regionally knowing where their matches will be played. There is no distance that could be too close or too far away from those stadiums for a base camp, but it’s not likely for a federation to choose a location that is a 5-hour flight from where they’ll be playing their matches. Once they know which group they’re in and where those matches will be played, they will identify where they want to train and they will tell us which options are best for them.
SFM: With the base camps not required to be in close proximity to the actual event venue, do you anticipate some crossover of base camp site selections from Club World Cup to World Cup 26?
Appelfeller: It’s two different tournaments, but in back-to-back years. If you look at the tournament we have this summer, it is based heavily on the coasts. There are matches on the West Coast and there are matches on the East Coast, but there’s nothing really in the middle of the country outside of Nashville and Cincinnati. The team base camp options we have on the East Coast and West Coast are options for 26 as well, and are in our brochure going out to the federations for next year. But, starting next year, there are a lot of options in the middle of the country – including in Mexico and Canada – that were not options for the clubs this year that will be options for next year.
SFM: How closely dialed in do the training pitches have to be to mimic the actual game sites?
Appelfeller: That’s probably the toughest part of the job we’re trying to do – especially when locating different sites around the stadiums. The stadiums will have different types of grass depending on where they’re at – whether it is bermudagrass or Kentucky bluegrass. The indoor stadiums will all be Kentucky bluegrass; but when we get outside of those stadiums, bermudagrass might be the preferred option for those areas. So, we’re now trying to mimic the inside conditions to the outside world. We are doing a lot of detailed testing and looking at the numbers of how that surface will play. We are trying to mimic it as much as we can for what can we expect on ball roll, hardness, and what the sheer feel like. If we can get those numbers similar, then we think the playability is not going to change from outside to inside. One of the hardest challenges we have is figuring out how to make a bermudagrass surface outside of a stadium play the same way as a stitched bluegrass inside the stadium.
SFM: What type of equipment are you using to test each site?
Appelfeller: We have a Clegg, we have a sheer tester, and we are checking moisture daily. We have a rotation of our staff going around to these sites every two to three days this summer taking readings, taking pictures, writing reports, and sharing them with the overall team so that we can make sure every training pitch is as similar to the stadiums as possible. It is a lot of reporting – numbers on top of numbers. Some of it makes sense to the naked eye, and for some of it you have to dig a little deeper to determine what is causing it to perform a certain way.
SFM: What does the interaction look like with the host venues for the base camps and the training sites? What type of interaction do you have with the existing sports field manager at each site, especially with regard to how each site will be managed?
Appelfeller: Part of us coming on early in this process was to make those relationships and have a working group that is not just Alan [FIFA Senior Pitch Management Manager Alan Ferguson] or Ewen [FIFA Head of Pitch Management Ewen Hodge] or the people at University of Tennessee and myself. There is a personal relationship that needs to be made with every groundskeeper. They are part of our team and we want them to feel that way. We’ve spent a long time getting to know every groundskeeper and grounds crew at each one of these locations. Any of the guys on my staff can walk in and have a deep conversation with the groundskeeper. We are now to the point where a lot of those groundskeepers treat us no differently than they treat their favorite sales rep. Each site has a special meaning for us; we know the good and bad at each site, and what we could expect to happen at each site. We have helped them develop their staffing and their plan. We know that what we are bringing here is a huge ask for a lot of these sites, and we want to be good partners with them.
SFM: How far in advance did you have to start that process?
Appelfeller: I came on in November, and one of the first things I did was go on the road to some of the sites and start building relationships. We hired two more people in January, and they have been at each site. Once every two or three weeks we have been going around in a rotation. Now, as the tournament is coming up, that will be there every two to three days.
But Alan has been visiting different sites since 2018. And Ewen and David Graham, who’s on our stadium side, have both gone around to a lot of the training sites. We’ve been working on those relationships since long before I got here – probably six or seven years at this point.
SFM: Can you give us a feel for what your team looks like just on the on the training camp and base camp side of things?
Appelfeller: Everything starts with Alan and Ewen, and theyprovide so much leadership and help to provide us with what we need.I fall directly under Ewen, overseeing all of the training sites for the United States and Mexico. We have Carlos Sartoretto, who is pitch cluster manager for the Mexico sites. In the U.S., we have Jason Griffith, who is in the northeastern portion of the country. Jason is a former groundskeeper for the Boston Red Sox and was head groundskeeper at Daytona International Speedway for seven or eight years. I know people probably don’t think NASCAR fits with the soccer world; but when you’re doing a track inspection for somebody driving over it at 220 miles per hour and something is not perfect, that is just as scary as having a pitch that can’t perform right for the World Cup.
In the south – Texas to Florida – we have Alex Redd, who was formerly with LSU and the University of Tennessee. Out west, we have Paul Cushing, who is a contractor and consultant. Then we just added three pitch venue managers, who are responsible for different regions of the country. In Charlotte, we have a consultant, Tanner Kaufman, who is at TGL Live in Palm Beach Gardens. Jeff Fowler will be in Atlanta, and Evan Fowler will work the D.C. area and the Midwest sites we are using this year. We have three pitch venue managers, and next year that will expand to include a lot of different areas of the country. But right now, the team is three of us who are full time focusing solely on training pitches, and four different consultants working with us.
SFM: Once you get into the actual tournament schedule – whether that’s Club World Cup or World Cup 26 – what changes for you and your team while the tournament is going on?
Appelfeller: For tournament time I will move to Miami, and I will live there for 45 days. Jason and Alex have already moved – they both have about 70 days away from home, living in the markets where the stadiums are located. It’s a more detailed dive-in. Instead of being there every two to three weeks, we are now going to be at each site every two to three days. I’ll work at headquarters with Ewen, calling all over the country as we will have training going on at 9 p.m. in Portland, for example, which is midnight on the East Coast. Along the East Coast, where Alex and Jason are already in market, they’re taking readings and talking to the groundskeepers. We need to know exactly what’s happening with the grass at every single site, every minute of every day – and that’s hard to do when you are spread out as much as we are.
SFM: What do you most hope to learn from the 2025 FIFA Club World Cup leading into FIFA World Cup 26?
Appelfeller: We’ve already learned so much. Like we talked about, it’s how we interact with the groundskeepers, making sure we have all the information we need, and making sure they have all the information they need. There is so much to be learned from this. Every day is something new, and that’s my favorite part about the team I’m working with. This group wants to learn and gather knowledge, and this tournament is certainly helping us for next year.