This is the fifth and final story in Sportico’s Turf Wars series, examining the business decisions behind choosing natural grass or artificial turf for an NFL stadium.
In 1969, then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle guessed that artificial turf would cover every NFL field within five years, 10 at the longest.
He was off by 45 years … and counting.
Today, it’s actually grass that boasts a futuristic sheen when it comes to being the playing surface of choice for high-tech fields. Soccer club Real Madrid, following a $2 billion renovation intended to pack more events into Santiago Bernabeu Stadium’s calendar, still plays on a fortified bed of natural grass. But on non-match days, the field is tucked into an underground greenhouse and monitored by an “Internet of Grass” system that maintains the right levels of water, heat and light.
As Sportico has laid out in its Turf Wars series, players often prefer to play on grass, finding it less stressful on their bodies. NFL team owners in charge of venues, meanwhile, value the economic flexibility synthetic surfaces provide as stadiums become year-round event centers. The divide, effectively between the NFL and the NFLPA, has left both sides eager for a scientific solution.
The debate has evolved multiple times over the decades. Grass-growers beat back the advances of early carpeted options, only to see the number of teams playing on alternatives jump 50% between 2000 and 2015.
And the expense has changed, too. Fifty years ago, turf cost more to install; now it’s generally grass that requires more expensive upkeep. As scientists from both realms keep pushing toward the same goal—“all the benefits of real grass and artificial turf, with the drawbacks of neither,” as FieldTurf reportedly advertised two decades ago—expect the lines to blur even further.
The Turf of Tomorrow
Today’s artificial turf looks a lot like grass. So-called monofilament (or single-fiber) products now appear to have individual blades that better mimic traditional surfaces. Balls bounce more like they do on grass, and players are less likely to suffer rug burns or turf toe.
The Cincinnati Bengals recently joined the Minnesota Vikings and Indianapolis Colts in replacing the previous “slit film” turf with a monofilament solution as the NFL pushes teams to install new-age offerings. Now there are no more 100% slit film fiber NFL fields, with only two using multi-fibers including slit (Carolina and Buffalo).
Underneath the turf’s top, multi-layer recipes for soil replacements—sometimes using natural ingredients such as olive cores—improve upon early versions that used recycled car tires, creating a more absorptive floor. Certain infills even require watering, just like their organic ancestors. Other advancements are focused on keeping turf cool or improving drainage systems, ensuring any rain that does hit the ground doesn’t stay in the turf for too long.
With each replacement every few years, NFL artificial turf adds numerous enhancements, and engineers still argue that there’s no reason science can’t produce a better surface than nature. Synthetic fibers, they contend, can surely be updated more quickly than survival-of-the-fittest based methods.
At the same time, league officials have looked at ways to improve the safety of turf without changing the surface itself. Custom cleats could make a difference, for example, as could better tools to test turf and track spots with extra wear. As multibillion-dollar venues look to recoup costs by hosting more non-NFL events, those techniques would ensure the fields are up to NFL standard on Sundays despite taking a beating from a concert or Monster Jam.
And yet, fake sod retains a central limitation when compared to its natural grass counterpart: It can’t regenerate.
Grass Gains
Oklahoma State turfgrass professor Dennis Martin likes to see his natural grass plots getting torn up on TV, clumps flying in the air or sticking to players. Because, the way he sees it, every bit of damage done to the ground is that much less trauma inflicted on athletes’ actual bodies. And the grass will grow back, giving it an attribute not yet matched by synthetic rivals that popped up roughly 55 million years later.
But there are traditional downsides to grass that researchers such as Martin have been trying to mitigate—including its inability to survive adverse conditions and the time it takes new seeds to take root—in response to artificial turf’s spread.
In 2010, Martin and colleague Yanqi Wu introduced two new strains of cold-tolerant Bermuda grass that could thrive farther north than before. Backed in part by funding from the U.S. Golf Association, they returned with an even newer breed in 2019. Named “Tahoma 31,” Oklahoma State’s blend used parent crops from Africa and China to produce a grass with improved durability. Heating systems help the fields hold up even longer.
The Chicago Bears and Eagles both signed up for the new stuff, joined by multiple college programs, MLB teams and even the folks responsible for seeding the U.S. Capitol Lawn.
Still, creating supergrasses is slow, uncertain work. Wu’s team is just beginning to look into gene editing as a way to further improve their crops. In the meantime, experts see more room to grow when it comes to grass management compared to changing the seeds themselves.
Tuckahoe Turf Farms, one of the largest growers in the Northeast, has developed a popular immediately-ready surface called game-day sod—representing a change from years ago when it took a grass field weeks after installation to get a firm footing. The game-day sod has opened additional revenue streams for its clients such as MetLife Stadium, which utilized the surface for soccer matches this summer. Huntington Bank Field in Cleveland is also a client.
FIFA is currently funding further research at the University of Tennessee and Michigan State University, focused in part on making grass even more portable ahead of the 2026 World Cup. Similar studies done ahead of the 1994 tournament, also held in the U.S., contributed to the retractable grass fields now used by the Arizona Cardinals and Las Vegas Raiders.
Thanks to such advances in the field, watching grass grow is no longer boring. “The sod industry—we don’t sell ourselves enough,” Tuckahoe Turf Farms manager Allen Carter said in an interview. “We need to do a better job of marketing.”
Real Madrid’s setup relies on red, blue, ultraviolet and infrared light, shown at different times of day or year based on the plant’s growth status. “We can manipulate how the grass grows,” University of Tennessee turfgrass science professor John Sorochan said. “We can make it grow faster, slower, be more durable.”
Tottenham Stadium also uses artificial lighting to maintain its pitch under one of the stands when it’s wheeled out of the £1 billion stadium and replaced with a temporary surface for other events. The disappearing act can take place in just 25 minutes. The grass is even removed when the NFL comes to town, replaced with an artificial turf that has been criticized by players despite being approved by NFL and NFLPA-appointed consultants.
“We came all the way over to London to play on f***ing cement?” a Buffalo bills player reportedly said last October.
Today’s grasses can be rolled up and rolled out. With the help of advanced drainage systems, they no longer turn to mud by November. In many ways, researchers have matched the benefits of turf. All that said, grass will never be as permanent as plastic. And swapping out grass fields remains pricey.
Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Field, operated by the Eagles, can go through four fields in a year, with each one costing as much as $400,000 to plant.
“The cost of sod is a cheap insurance to protect your players,” Eagles head groundskeeper Tony Leonard said—though he’s not the one cutting the checks.
For now, the players’ union and the owners are trying to find common ground. They’re working together to improve surface consistency—whether grass or not—and continuing to collect data on all forms of fields. As a league that seems to value uniformity above almost everything else, the variability between locations remains a problem to solve.
The Fields to Come
Real Madrid’s pitch isn’t just grass, in fact. The pitch was made more durable with the addition of—yes—synthetic fibers. That hybrid approach has become the norm among cathedrals of European soccer. And it’s made its way stateside, too.
In 2018, a machine imported from Japan was put atop Lambeau Field’s hallowed field and instructed to shoot pieces of plastic seven inches into the ground at ¾-inch increments. The process took a week. The SIS Grass solution meant the Packers could play atop sand, which supports proper drainage, without worrying about the field growing wobbly as 300-pounders pounded away on top of it. The added strands would also help the field withstand Wisconsin’s rough winters.
The unique solution took root in Green Bay, because Green Bay is unique. The publicly held, nonprofit Packers host fewer non-football events than other NFL teams and value keeping their tundra natural as a tie to the past. The Eagles, previously the only other NFL club laying down a hybrid field, ditched their GrassMaster surface and committed to un-reinforced grass in 2007 as its event calendar filled out, valuing the ability to uproot its grounds when needed.
But the hybrid category appears poised to grow. The NFL recently gave grants totaling $100,000 to two companies creating more consistent and safer surfaces. The league will support one of GrassMaster’s recent innovations, PlayMaster, which starts with a synthetic surface that is then seeded with natural grass. It was used for the NFL’s two 2023 games in Frankfurt, Germany, and reportedly can be installed more quickly than alternatives. FieldTurf, meanwhile, is receiving funding focused on its “liquid surface modifier” which works to speed up the settling in process of newly laid turf.
SIS Grass has expanded its offerings, too. The company has developed a shallower, more portable pitch that can be more easily removed when needed. This winter, it also installed what it says was the first fully indoor hybrid field in Riyadh, creating a setup that could live in the Kingdom Arena even though the 30,000-seat Saudi Arabian venue lets in no natural sunlight.
Until a true technological breakthrough changes the game, movement in today’s Turf War equilibrium is more likely to come from barristers, boardrooms or bargaining tables. If history is any guide, compromises seem certain.
Two recently built mega-venues, which cost a combined $7 billion, diverged in the debate between artificial turf (SoFi Stadium) and grass (Allegiant Stadium). Stadiums under development in Tennessee (artificial turf) and Buffalo (grass) are on track to maintain the league’s incidental balance.
As the 2024 NFL season kicks off, players’ cleats will dig into 15 artificial turf surfaces and 15 grass fields (including one with some plastic sewn in). The turf wars will grind on, and don’t adjust your TV set if the grass appears greener somewhere else. Artificial turf remains the surface of the future, as it has been for a half-century now. Meanwhile, grass just keeps on evolving.
