What’s the challenge with having natural grass for all North American sports stadiums?

The Game Room
41

Finally scanned that article. (link) According to the scrolling table toward the bottom, MetLife Stadium doesn’t have FieldTurf, it has something called UBU Sports Turf, which looks like a reasonable choice to me. Not the best, not the worst. I have no idea if climate factors into which ones you should pick, but it doesn’t strike me as a crazy choice.

For easy reference just so I can wrap my head around who has what, at least according to that table:

4 FieldTurf variants: Seahawks, Saints, Patriots, Lions
3 UBU Sports Turf: Giants/Jets, Bengals, Vikings
2 Matrix: Cowboys, Texans
2 Hybrid: Packers, Eagles
1 Momentum: Colts
1 A-Turf Titan: Bills
1 MX 3-Star Turf (?): Falcons

The rest grass, but the article isn’t current for the Raiders or Rams/Chargers.

Is the complaint against artificial turf in general? Just UBU turf? Or maybe just recently-installed turf (not broken in) regardless what kind it is?

42

No it’s not just you. After reading this thread I had to check if the Breeders’ Cup Turf horserace is or isn’t run on actual grass as I’d assumed for the last 35 years.

(It is on real grass if anyone is wondering).

43

What a coincidence. The NFLPA came out today saying the NFL should switch to real grass because of safety issues. Too bad they’re a terribly weak union and they just extended the contract.

44

I’m down with the message except he kind of just brushed over the whole “Cold-climate teams like the Packers, Steelers and Browns successfully maintain natural grass fields.” as if to say therefore nobody else should have issues either.

The football stadium 4 miles from Times Square tends to get filled to capacity from concerts and whatnot slightly more often than in Green Bay, I would guess. At least in non-pandemic times. Not to mention the fact that MetLife hosts almost twice as many NFL games per year as any of the stadiums he mentions.

I remain unconvinced that natural grass is a real option for MetLife Stadium. It was pretty much an unmitigated disaster when they tried it with Giants Stadium back in 2000-2002.

45

You’re right; other than Packer games, the field at Lambeau only gets used a couple of times per year:

  • They hold their annual shareholders meeting in the stadium (as they usually get thousands of attendees), and the main “stage” is on the grass (as shown in this picture). However, I imagine that it’s fairly low-impact to the field.
  • There have been a handful of concerts held at Lambeau, but never more than one in a year (and those are typically held in June, giving plenty of time to rehab the field afterwards).
  • They hosted a University of Wisconsin football game in 2016, and would have hosted another one this year, but it was cancelled due to the pandemic.
  • They’ve also hosted an outdoor college hockey game, and a snowmobiling event, but as those are held in the winter, they’re held on the prior season’s field surface, which gets torn out and re-sodded in the spring.
46

That seems insanely wasteful to me, but not in a critical way, more in a sense of commanding respect. Tip of the hat to Green Bay.

I’ve been trying to google up the event calendar for Giants Stadium during the 3 years they tried natural grass, but it’s rough. I did find the current event calendar for MetLife Stadium, though, and that’s illustrative enough, I think. Page 2 shows the tentative pandemic re-schedulings. The original dates were supposed to be:

Saturday, July 18th, 2020 Guns N’ Roses
Wednesday, August 19th, 2020 Lady Gaga
Saturday, August 22nd, 2020 Kenny Chesney
Thursday, September 10th, 2020 Rammstein (?)
Army-Navy Game

That seems like a lot of usage was planned during the preseason and even into the season for a stadium hosting an NFL game every single week.

On the one hand, there’s no law saying you have to book the stadium for concerts and college football games and MLS games. If you shut it down other than the NFL games, maybe grass might work well. Still double the games, but maybe. You’d be kicking out MLS and whatever college games so that’s a bummer, but hypothetically it’s possible.

Even if waving a magic wand to make all that happen, the problem is that it’s the massive stadium 4 miles from Times Square. It’s kind of a big deal to have that stadium there and available for use for major events. It’s not iconic like MSG but it’s a pretty major concert hub. I saw Pink Floyd and The Who at Giants Stadium, plus many Grateful Dead shows. Several more I’m not necessarily willing to admit.

It was practically Bruce Springsteen’s home stadium, selling out 10 shows in July to August of 2003, at least according to the stadium’s wiki page. Ten sold-out Springsteen concerts just before and during preseason?! Yeah, clearly that was back into the turf era.

But exactly that. I’m not a big Springsteen fan, but I’m happy that Giants Stadium was there for him to sell out 10 shows in the summer of 2003. That must have been an awesome summer for the band and the fans. I don’t want that kind of venue taken away so that we can try to save the grass for 20 NFL games and nothing else, y’know? I say fuck that noise.

I will stand in solidarity in calling for a new third generation of artificial turf, but I just don’t see or want natural grass for MetLife Stadium. I want MetLife selling out major concerts with the biggest acts because that’s part of the fabric of life here in the NYC area.

47

I had no idea that Giants/MetLife Stadium hosted so many concerts and other events. That certainly demonstrates why natural grass is so problematic there. And, obviously, Green Bay is a far smaller market, with fewer major concerts, and the city and team both are dedicated to keeping that field in as good a condition as they can.

Rammstein is a German dance-metal band, BTW. :slight_smile: I know of them, and have listened to them a bit, but I’m impressed that they can fill a football stadium; I didn’t realize that they have that big of a following in the U.S.

48

Both ownership and the fanbases were super excited to switch to grass in 2000. They poured buckets of money into it to try and make it work but it just clearly didn’t. But then everyone was relieved and almost equally excited that the second generation of turf was so awesome. Problem solved! That’s why the complaints about the turf seem to out of left field to me; I thought this was problem was solved 20 years ago.

Googling around, here’s a New York Times article from February 2003 about going back to artificial turf. The most relevant quotes from the fairly long article below:

That last sentence is key: The Giants Stadium turf up until 1999 was horrific; only the Vet was worse. So when I hear complaints about the turf at MetLife now, my immediate thought is “Put the old turf back in and then you’ll really have something to cry about!”

In case the quote above is stricken for being too long, bullet points:

  • FieldTurf announced as the new surface. AstroPlay was considered, and the players generally liked both.
  • The grass field they’d tried for 2.5 years used a replaceable tray system, but despite frequently replacing worn trays the field was still sloppy and unsteady.
  • The NFLPA conducted a poll just before this article, and players ranked Seattle’s FieldTurf as the 3rd best playing surface in the league, ahead of 20 natural-grass fields. Makes the FieldTurf choice seem like a no-brainer.
  • That poll also ranked Philly’s Vet Stadium as worst in the league, followed immediately by Giants Stadium.
49

It occurs to me that I misinterpreted that player poll. I think the article is saying that the NFLPA player poll voted Giants Stadium’s natural grass as the second-worst surface in the league, ahead of only Philly’s rock-hard old-style astroturf. That’s some seriously shitty grass.

But I guess now the UBU turf is among the worst in the league, so once again NY/NJ is at the bottom of the list? Poor NY/NJ can’t figure out a field surface to save their lives.

50

MLS games are no longer played at MetLife. The Red Bull’s have their own stadium in Harrison and NYC FC play at Yankee stadium.

I’ve been to a few soccer games (international friendlies) at MetLife, and the surface is always grass. I don’t the Brazil and Argentina football associations would allow their players to play on artificial turf. Players’ club team may also not allow it. MLS stadiums, although, are often artificial turf.

I guess soccer is less destructive to grass? How about rugby? Is that ever played on artificial turf?

51

That’s not quite true. Mexico City had a hybrid system as well, but it got beat up too hard to play NFL games. Like in 2018 when the Mexico City game had to be moved back stateside due to turf conditions. They actually played there in 2019 but the natural grass replacement was terrible. This won’t be an issue this year because there won’t be a game there.

It can’t all be placed on soccer - Azteca is a major multi-use stadium with concerts and such. It is apparently in decent enough shape for soccer but on the marginal to unacceptable end for football.

52

That’s slightly overstating it (and mostly because of sharing space with American football teams). The MLS teams that play on artificial turf are Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, New England, Cincinnati, Nashville, and Atlanta. Seattle, New England, and Atlanta share space with an NFL team (whose preferences are king). Nashville is temporarily using an NFL stadium while its natural grass stadium is being built. Vancouver is using a stadium built for CFL. Cincinnati is temporarily playing at the University of Cincinnati’s stadium - but the stadium they are building will have natural grass.

Portland is the only team that chooses to go with artificial turf - and I believe it’s due to issues with growing good natural grass fields in the Pacific Northwest.

53

FWIW, when they aren’t getting games postponed/canceled, Nashville SC, the Tennessee Titans, and Tennessee State all play on grass at Nissan Stadium.

54

Ah, for some reason I thought it was artificial. My mistake!