What struck me most about visiting the abandoned Pontiac Silverdome in 2016 was the sounds of the place. The way the wind ruffled the tattered roof panels and plucked past the dome's support cables like guitar strings. As I walked through the stadium, I occasionally heard the sound of metal parts falling from above and hitting the ground around me. It was a bit unsettling.
Located in a northern suburb of Detroit, Michigan, this stadium hadn't been used for years when I arrived with my camera. A snowstorm in 2013 blew the roof to shreds. A year later, most of the equipment was auctioned off, leaving the stadium an empty shell. At that point, the once stark and polished stadium had begun to return to nature. Looking down, I recall seeing tiny shoots of natural grass peeking through the artificial turf.
The Silverdome in 2016 (Pablo Maurer/The Athletic)
This wasn't my first encounter with the Silverdome.
In 1994, I was an anxious 14-year-old boy living in Tennessee, still reeling from the suicide of my then-boss, Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain. Sensing an opportunity to bond with their children, my parents packed me and my brother in their old Toyota and took us on a cross-country road trip to his hometown of Seattle in the Pacific Northwest to pay their respects. They decided to make the trip during the 1994 World Cup Finals in the United States, watching the tournament along the way.
Built in 1975 on the outskirts of Detroit, the Silverdome was born from the idea of a local architect and professor who wanted to build a stadium “modeled after the Roman Colosseum.” Detroit's lifeblood, the auto industry, was beginning to decline, and proponents of an arena argued that it would revitalize the entire neighborhood, an old fallacy. The 80,000-seat stadium was built quickly, and its most distinctive feature was its wavy white roof that turned silver in the sunlight. Formerly known as the Pontiac Metropolitan Stadium, the stadium was soon renamed the Silverdome.
The first World Cup match of the 1994 season was played at the Silverdome in front of a crowd of 73,425 (Perry McIntyre/ISI Photo/Getty Images)
The stadium was built as the new home of the NFL's Detroit Lions, but initially shared the facilities with the North American Soccer League's Detroit Express, managed by Trevor Francis, the former Birmingham City and Nottingham Forest striker who was English football's first £1 million player. The Silverdome became a huge hit, hosting everything from monster truck rallies to wrestling matches and Sunday Masses led by Pope John Paul II himself.
The stadium was notorious for being noisy during NFL games and hot, especially in the summer, due to the lack of air conditioning, but when organizers of the '94 World Cup chose Detroit to be one of the host cities, the heat and humidity weren't the biggest challenge they faced. They never were.
No major sporting event had ever been held on a temporary natural turf inside an indoor venue before, and the Silverdome's roof – made of fiberglass and Teflon and held up by giant pressurized fans – was designed to block out almost 90 percent of the sunlight, making it seem impossible to install a grass field.
Today, advances in technology have made laying a temporary grass pitch indoors a relatively simple task. When researchers began work on designing the Silverdome's natural playing field in 1992, they didn't even know where to start.
Dr. Trey Rogers, now a professor in the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences at Michigan State University, was instrumental in making that dream a reality.
He remembers his first question when the World Cup organizing committee contacted his team: “What is the World Cup?”
“There were three things we had to deal with,” Rogers says. “We basically had to move a temporary field into an area where natural grass wouldn't grow. So, first, we had to find a container or device to put the grass and soil in. Second, the grass itself, which we ended up growing elsewhere. And third, how do we maintain the grass once we brought it inside?”
Researchers at Michigan State University have solved the third challenge in a very ingenious way.
They built a 6,500-square-foot research dome (dubbed “Silverdome West”) about 75 miles from the stadium, made from the same material as the real roof. There they tried two types of grass, five types of soil, and different levels of light. As Rogers recalls, soccer's international governing body, FIFA, had serious doubts that the project would work and set ambitious goals for tournament organizers: the grass field had to be ready a year in advance. The field debuted not for the World Cup, but for the 1993 U.S. Cup, a four-nation warm-up tournament played in June that year at five venues across the United States.
“Research that Trey did when he was a graduate student at Pennsylvania State University (another US university) showed that you needed at least six inches of soil under the turf for players to not be able to feel the pavement underneath,” says John Steer, a former research assistant at Michigan State University and now associate dean at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.
Switzerland and Romania finish off the match at the Silverdome during the 1994 World Cup (Jonathan Daniel/ALLSPORT)
“We worked with a company called Three-Dimensional Services out of Auburn Hills, Michigan, to design and build big steel hexagons that we could fill with a special mixture of sand, organic matter and clay, and then lay turf on top of them. The sides of the hexagons were removable, so we built the field mostly outside, and then we transported the panels inside the stadium on a flatbed trailer and removed them with a forklift. We then squeezed the hexagons together and built the field. It worked perfectly.”
Germany and England debuted the stadium at the US Cup on June 19, 1993, and it was met with rave reviews. “It's like a miracle,” Germany coach Berti Vogts said at the time. “The pitch is perfect and the hall is magnificent.” Striker Jurgen Klinsmann echoed the coach's sentiments: “You can't see the sky, but it's fantastic. The field was just perfect. We didn't expect it to be this good.”
After the U.S. Cup, workers moved the field to the stadium's parking lot, where it remained until the following year, “much to the dismay of the Detroit Lions and the NFL,” Rogers says, “because it took up 380 parking spaces.”
A little more than a year after Germany vs. England, 73,425 fans packed into the stadium to watch the USA take on Switzerland in their first group game. It was the first World Cup match to be played indoors, and it was a memorable one, with Eric Wynalda electrifying the crowd with a perfect free kick to earn the hosts a draw.
That memory is so burned into my mind that when I visited that spot 22 years later, one of the first things I did was fulfill a childhood dream of walking out onto the field to almost the exact spot where the free kick was taken, running over and hitting an imaginary dead ball.
Eventually, I walked into a luxury suite and media area to find something truly amazing: a box filled with pamphlets that had been handed out at the 1993 U.S. Cup matches and touting the rise of Major League Soccer, which would begin three years later.
Less than a decade after the World Cup came to Pontiac, the Silverdome began to decline.
The Lions moved to downtown Detroit in 2002 and the stadium was left without a permanent tenant. The city of Pontiac (the stadium's owners) had been trying to find a use for the facility for years, but by 2009 the city itself was in financial difficulty and was forced to sell.
For just $550,000 (£422,000 at current exchange rates), the stadium and its contents were sold to a Canadian property developer. They gave it a fresh coat of paint, reopened it, and hosted a few events over the next four years. But it never made a profit, and when a storm in 2013 destroyed the roof, the owners couldn't find anyone to repair it. Just four years later, about a year after I visited, the stadium was demolished.
However, initial attempts to blow up the upper floors of the stadium failed and it would not collapse easily. Eventually, the stadium collapsed.
The Silverdome was a technological marvel, but it never endeared itself to players or fans. It felt dated and fake, maybe. Players complained about the artificial turf, and fans complained that the Lions always sucked. There was little nostalgia when the Lions moved, and even less when the stadium was demolished.
Artificial turf in 2016 (Pablo Maurer/The Athletic)
In some ways, its lasting legacy may be its place in World Cup history, and in the history of turf studies.
Rogers remains deeply involved in that science, having a front-row seat to this summer's Copa America, where the state of the indoor stadium pitches quickly became a hot topic. He wasn't involved in the design or maintenance of the temporary natural-grass stadiums that players, coaches and fans lamented; he was there simply as an observer, taking notes ahead of the 2026 World Cup, which will be played in five indoor stadiums.
“You need the right turf, which they probably did (at the Copa America),” Rogers said. “You need containers to grow the grass in, which they didn't do. And then you have to manage the grass within the stadium. If you look at the Copa America, there was one field that did all of that: AT&T Stadium in Dallas. That's what 2026 will be like.”
Rogers and his team devised an effective solution to the problems of temporary turf fields more than 30 years ago. But the modular system they used is outdated, given major advances in how turf is manufactured and transported. Grow lights, once difficult and costly to obtain, are now routinely used in stadiums around the world.
“We've come up with a technology that works very well,” Steer says. “It's been very expensive. We spent over a million dollars just on the field itself, and that doesn't include labor and things like that. So the field is now over $3 million. We've been working on developing a better system for temporary turf. We're aware of the issues we saw at the Copa America and in the last few weeks at the Olympics. We've been working on ways to make our portable fields better. We have some systems that we think might work better, and we'll continue to test them over the next year or two.”
An interesting side note to the story of the Silverdome's temporary grass pitch is that it still lives on today.
After the tournament, it was moved to a public park on Belle Isle in Detroit.
A memorial notes that the grass beneath the visitors' feet was the exact same pitch used in a World Cup match 30 years ago.
Indeed, this is the only place in the world where anyone can enjoy football on the fields where the World Cup was played.
(Top photo: Getty/David Cannon/ALLSPORT)
