Despite the growing frustration of National Football League (NFL) players towards the use of artificial turf in the sport, grass surfaces are still used in more stadiums than artificial turf.
There are 32 teams and 30 stadiums in the NFL. The Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers stadium share and on the east coast, the New York Giants and New York Jets both play in the same stadium.
Out of the 30 stadiums in the league, 16 of them use grass playing surfaces and 14 use artificial turf.
One of the key reasons for some players being vocally against artificial turf, is due to the increased risk of injuries that are sustained on artificial grass.
Odell Beckham Jr, who currently is a free agent after most recently winning a Super Bowl with the Rams, has been very outspoken about wanting NFL owners to make grass the standard playing surface across the leagues stadiums and remove artificial turf from the sport.
After the 30-year old’s former teammate and close friend Sterling Shepard injured his Anterior Crucial Ligament (ACL) earlier this season with the New York Giants, Beckham took to Twitter to vent his frustration on another player being the victim of a non-contact injury on artificial turf.
Beckham started his NFL career with the Giants and spent some of the most successful years of his playing career with the East Rutherford based team.
The 2014 offensive rookie of the year was traded in March 2019 to the Cleveland Browns and in 2020 suffered an ACL injury on artificial turf, which put a premature end to his season.
Beckham joined the Rams last season, after being released from the Browns earlier in the year.
The three-time Pro Bowler would play a key role in the Rams post season hunt for a Super Bowl, making two receptions for 52 yards and one touchdown to help his team win a second Lombardi in franchise history.
Beckham suffered a second ACL injury during the Super Bowl, one of many players in recent years to go down with a non-contact injury on artificial turf.
Why do some stadiums opt for turf over grass?
There is a lot of reasons for NFL owners wanting to use artificial turf, one of them is that turf is easier to maintain compared to grass. This automatically makes it more favourable to owners as the maintenance costs are lower compared to the costs to maintain grass.
A visualisation of NFL stadiums and their surface type shows that stadiums outdoors in warm locations in the US do tend to prefer to use grass in their stadiums.
In Florida, all three NFL stadiums are outdoors, and all have a grass playing field.
But this does not transfer to the deep south region, as the Dallas Cowboys, Houston Texans, New Orleans Saints and Atlanta Falcons, all use artificial turf.
All four of these teams have stadiums that are either indoors or have a retractable roof, and all four are built for a multifunctional purpose.
There is a split between surface types in the northeast and mid-west regions. Venues that use artificial turf are again all multifunctional stadiums.
Teams that opt to use grass like the Browns, Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers, all use grass to maintain their identity of being old school teams.
Fans of these teams are accustomed to seeing their team play in harsh weather conditions and grass playing surfaces play a role in creating that old school feel.
Most NFL stadiums built within the last two decades were built with the aim of being multifunctional. The home of the Giants and Jets, MetLife stadium, plays host to concerts and events such as Supercross during the NFL offseason.
The NFL season including playoffs runs from September to early February. Owners of the stadiums have to find sources of revenue during this downtime and the appeal of making a stadium multifunctional becomes more appealing to owners within the league, which is why the sport is seeing a rise in artificial turf usage.
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