FIFA doesn’t want to talk about installing grass for next summer’s Women’s World Cup in Canada. The Canadian Soccer Association doesn’t want to talk about it, either.

Trey Rogers? He’s happy to talk about it.

Rogers, a professor of turf grass management at Michigan State University, was the scientist in charge of the installation of real grass over the fake version inside the Pontiac Silverdome for the 1994 men’s World Cup, when FIFA required that the playing surface there be changed to grass. He and his team spent more than a year and a half figuring out how to keep grass alive inside a domed stadium for a month.

“When we first started, I stayed awake two nights thinking about it because we didn’t have anywhere close to the answers,” Rogers said.

Twenty years later, the prospect of turning six artificial turf fields into grass ones for the Women’s World Cup — a tournament to be played mostly in open-air stadiums — seems to be an impossible task. Maybe that explains the silence of FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association. They have not responded to a letter from a group of top players threatening legal action, which is expected to begin shortly, or to social media pleas from top players like Abby Wambach and Hope Solo and supporters like Kobe Bryant and Kevin Durant. This week, they also declined a chance to discuss the matter with me.