LOS ANGELES — Omar Duran had never been to SoFi Stadium until Monday. So consider his visit for the Copa América group-stage game between Brazil and Costa Rica something of a trial run for the 2026 World Cup, now less than two years away.

"It's beautiful," Duran said, gripping a beer in his left hand as he made his away along the stadium's spacious concourse. "It's amazing what they have done."

The game, which ended in a scoreless draw, was something of a practice run for the stadium too. The first in a series of test runs, actually, since SoFi will play host to another Copa América game Wednesday, when Mexico faces Venezuela. Then in late July, English Premier League giants Arsenal and Manchester United will meet there in a friendly.

And for Otto Benedict, the stadium's senior vice president for facility and campus operations, nothing will be too small to overlook given the task ahead. In 2026, SoFi will stage eight World Cup matches, including the U.S. team's opener, the first men's World Cup match to be played on American soil in 32 years. Only AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, with nine games, will play host to more.

"The things that people probably don't think about," Benedict said when asked what he was focused Monday. "It's a weekday. Our next game is a Wednesday. When we have World Cup games, we're going to have weekday games.

"How much traffic we see on the streets right now, we want to know that because that's going to impact how we're preparing. So every little detail is something that we're looking at to understand how that works."

The bigger things will be dictated by FIFA, global soccer's ruling body and the organizer of the World Cup. FIFA prohibits artificial turf in major tournaments, for example, so SoFi's Matrix Turf field was covered with a temporary carpet of desert-grown natural grass from West Coast Turf for this week's two Copa América games. For the World Cup, the field will be raised a couple of feet and another type of grass installed.

"This is a warm-season grass," Benedict said. "The FIFA research team thinks this will be a cool-season-grass building. So they're doing a lot of independent testing. But for us, it's just good to see how much moisture's getting in the air. How is it reacting?

"It's all good learning and points that we're going to take and share that with people and say, 'Hey, here's what we got out of this event.'"

SoFi's floor is also too narrow to accommodate a regulation-size soccer field, which must be at least 74 yards wide along the goal line. That will be remedied for 2026 by eliminating field-level suites in the four corners and widening the playing surface, although that was not done for Copa América.

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