North Texas’ World Cup organizers lay out work ahead after enjoying brief victory lap

ARLINGTON – Back from a triumphant 48 hours in Washington, D.C., Dallas Sports Commission executive director Monica Paul blushed Tuesday as the two men with whom she shared the dais showered her with kudos.

To her right sat North Texas FIFA World Cup Organizing Committee co-chair Dan Hunt. To her left was Cowboys executive vice president of business operations Chad Estis.

“I’m thrilled for her to kind of have a victory lap with what happened with the draw and the awesome matches that we’re going to have,” Estis said.

Indeed, last week’s draw and match pairings reaped a bonanza for North Texas, with AT&T Stadium guaranteed of hosting games featuring reigning champion and world No. 2 Argentina, No. 4 England, No. 7 Netherlands, No. 10 Croatia and No. 18 Japan – and that’s just in group play.

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(From left) Monica Paul, executive director of the Dallas Sports Commission, Chad Estes,...

But Paul’s victory lap? Out of necessity, that’s been cut short as Paul and the organizing committee turn to next summer’s mammoth task of hosting a World Cup-high nine matches and an estimated 2.7 million soccer fans from around the world.

Fittingly, Tuesday’s news conference was held in AT&T Stadium, site of next June’s five group stage games; a pair of round of 32 matches; one quarterfinal match and on July 14 a semifinal.

“There’s not a better stadium in the world,” Paul said. “We’ve hosted many, many events here; we’d love to continue into the future. But this one is going to set us into another level.

“It’s going to take a village, but I’m very excited for what is to come. This is a once in a generation opportunity for us to leave a true, lasting legacy – not only for the sport of soccer, but for our region.”

Now that the organizing committee knows which national teams and fanbases are coming to North Texas for group play, years of general planning now moves into hyperdrive and becomes more specified.

Paul, Hunt and Estis laid out a timeline of occurrences in North Texas, and specifically inside AT&T Stadium, during the 186 days leading to the June 14, Netherlands-Japan group stage opener in Arlington.

For the next few weeks, the primary focus will be to woo national teams to the five FIFA-approved base camp sites in North Texas: Toyota Stadium and FC Dallas’ training facility in Frisco; Dallas Baptist; TCU; the University of North Texas and Mansfield Stadium.

Even before last week’s draw, officials from at least a dozen national teams visited the area. On Monday of this week, multiple teams visited Toyota Stadium, including Argentina.

Since Argentina is playing two group stage matches in AT&T Stadium, it’s logical that it would set up its six-week base camp in North Texas, but FC Dallas president Hunt on Tuesday refuted one news report that Argentina already had picked Toyota Stadium.

“Yeah, I did see that report, and I was hoping it was right, but no decisions have been made at this point,” Hunt said.

Starting in January, the 42 teams that have qualified for the 48-team World Cup will submit their training camp preferences to FIFA. Submissions will be sent in order of world ranking, so if No. 2 Argentina wants to train at Toyota Stadium, the only team that could prevent that from happening is No. 1 Spain.

That seems unlikely, since Spain is playing two of its group matches in Atlanta.

“We have five primary base camps and we’re going to try to fill every single one of them, so we’re welcoming everybody here, obviously,” Hunt said. “It would be a massive honor to have Argentina here. Their fan base is so passionate and so amazing.”

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The North Texas FWC Organizing Committee comprising Dan Hunt Monica Paul and Chad Estis... View Gallery

Hunt said FIFA is not expected to announce until March or April which teams will train where, but Paul noted that, internally, the North Texas organizing committee should have a good idea by late January which teams will train here.

It’s expected that national teams will start arriving for base camps during the last week of May. For most if not all of the teams that came to Toyota Stadium on Monday, it was not their first visit there.

“This is much more about the nuts and bolts,” Hunt said. “They’ve been spending a lot of time with our staff about the small details – weight rooms; field quality; number of fields; places to stay.”

Also in January, specifically on the 14th, FIFA officials will arrive to set up offices in Dallas’ Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center, which also will be the broadcast center and telecommunications hub of the entire World Cup, hosting more than 3,000 broadcasters and technicians.

Another January milestone: The North Texas organizing committee plans to announce details of the Fan Festival in Fair Park, which is projected to attract 35,000 visitors per day during the World Cup.

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Now that North Texas knows which teams are coming here, those fan events can be tailored to the teams’ respective fan bases.

For soccer purists, and World Cup teams and players themselves, nothing will be more important than the playing atmosphere in AT&T Stadium and, especially, the quality of the natural grass pitch.

This past June, The Dallas Morning News detailed the lengths that the Cowboys organization, led by Estis and AT&T Stadium general manager Tod Martin, have gone to tackle the challenge of installing and maintaining natural grass in an indoor stadium for 39 straight days.

AT&T Stadium’s World Cup Kentucky Bluegrass – and multiple backup fields are currently being harvested in Colorado. It will be shipped to North Texas in refrigerated trucks.

Weeks before the first matches, crews will remove AT&T Stadium’s artificial Matrix Turf and begin adding sublayers: drain mats, gravel, USGA-grade sand, an irrigation system and the sod itself.

AT&T Stadium purchased large LED Grow Lights from Netherlands-based SGL System and Martin devised a system to rig the lights to AT&T Stadium’s roof system, so the lights can be raised and lowered over the grass instead of being rolled atop it.

“I think we’re going to have as good of a playing surface as there is in the world, in an indoor stadium, from a temporary perspective, and it’s never been done like that before,” Estis said Tuesday, when asked how prepared AT&T Stadium officials are. “So yes, it’s a little nerve wracking, but super exciting, and we’re highly confident in it.”

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In anticipation of hosting the World Cup, Cowboys officials completed a two-year, $300 million “refresh” of 2009-built AT&T Stadium to enhance fan experience.

Improvements included new flooring, furniture, audio-visual components to club levels, as well as refreshing merchandise and concession areas.

“Certainly it was strategic, the timing of that,” Estis said. “We started talking about that four or five years ago. Obviously a lot of planning goes into that, but to try and get that done for the World Cup was certainly intentional.”

That $300 million of improvements doesn’t include the tens of millions of dollars that will be required to prepare the stadium floor for installing a World Cup-size soccer field.

The Cowboys have two regular-season home games remaining and, they hope, a home playoff game. Other events are scheduled for AT&T Stadium in February, including the Monster Jam on Feb. 14 and Monster Energy Supercross Championship a week later.

Shortly after those events, construction crews will remove “multiple” field-level suits in each of the stadium’s four corners.

“A soccer pitch is usually around 114 yards long, so length is not a problem,” Hunt said. “The width is the issue. American football fields are 53 yards and a couple of feet wide, so we’ve got to raise the field and take up a little bit of the seating bowl to get the width we need, which will be around 74 yards wide.”

Estis and Paul declined to say Tuesday how much that work will cost. Paul said some of the costs hinge on final approval from FIFA on the specifications it wants.

After the semifinal match on July 14, crews will work to reconstruct the suites and return the lower bowl to normal before Cowboys preseason games begin.

“That was a big part of the discussion when we were going through the paces with FIFA to learn that we’re going to have to have a construction project and really understand what it would take to go into those corners and take some suites out – and could we get it back?” Estis said.

“Those suites are leased to Cowboys suite holders, so it’s very important to make sure that we could get it back for the preseason. So we have a timeline that does that. It’s going to be real tight.”

After years of planning and waiting for the 2026 World Cup, the timeline is going to speed up considerably in North Texas during the next six months, on many fronts.

The rest of Paul’s victory lap will have to wait.

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