By Alan Baldwin
MIAMI, May 4 (Reuters) – Formula One has been and gone for another year but Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium is now in a race to get ready for the soccer World Cup starting next month.
Argentine great Lionel Messi was in the Miami Grand Prix paddock at the weekend, visiting Alpine F1 driver and compatriot Franco Colapinto before Sunday’s grand prix and treading the green static-charged carpet laid out over the stadium’s field of play where teams had their tented hospitality units.
Within hours of the race ending, the focus was already on starting the transformation to something more familiar to Messi — real grass and a playing surface fit for the 48-team tournament.
The 65,000-capacity stadium in Miami Gardens, home of the Dolphins NFL team, will host seven of the 104 World Cup matches — four group games, a round-of-32 match, a quarter-final and the third-place playoff.
The first is on June 15, between Saudi Arabia and Uruguay. Cabo Verde, Brazil, Scotland, Colombia and Portugal will also play there in the group stages.
The multi-use venue that also hosts college football, tennis and rock concerts on a busy calendar of nearly 60 ticketed events a year is used to operating on a tight schedule and hosted Club World Cup soccer last year.
Transforming the stadium from Miami Open tennis to Formula One, building temporary infrastructure and stands, involved working around the clock from the end of March and it started all over again from Sunday.
The stadium owners literally sowed the seeds months ago — the Dolphins are unique as a professional U.S. sports franchise in having their own sod farm specifically to grow turf for their arena.
The grass for the World Cup has been growing at the 96-acre Loxahatchee Groves facility, some 61 miles (98 km) north of the stadium, and will be transported down in mid-May.
The farm can grow enough at any one time for 20 separate fields of play.
“Each year we probably resod, depending upon the event schedule, eight to 10 times a year,” Todd Boyan, senior vice president of stadium operations for the Dolphins, told reporters ahead of the F1 weekend.
“That grass is professionally grown and has the spec that the NFL requires, but FIFA has also required. It’ll take us within one day that grass is removed (from the farm), and then there’s about a three-day process to install it.
“Then FIFA is going to come in behind that and do the pitch stitching that they’re doing for all World Cup venues.”
(Reporting by Alan Baldwin, editing by Ed Osmond)
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