NFL players saw many of their stadiums swap artificial turf for natural grass when the venues hosted 2026 FIFA World Cup matches, and their collective reaction has grown into an NFL Players Association-sponsored movement. The athletes want the league to fully adopt natural grass and say that the World Cup proves it is feasible. Decision-makers, however, are split on the issue.
San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle said this summer that he estimates 90% of players prefer to play on grass and that the league could fully adopt such surfaces if team owners "really gave a s---." Half of the NFL's stadiums already maintain grass fields, and one owner spoke strongly in support of them amid the players' call to action.
When Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis moved the team from Oakland, he only saw one option for the playing surface at his new stadium: natural grass. Davis showed that it is possible not only to grow and maintain a league-approved grass field in the desert but that it can also be done for an indoor stadium. The Arizona Cardinals have had a similar setup for two decades, too, with their retractable field tray.
"There was no way I was going to build the stadium or anything else to play on artificial turf," Davis said last weekend to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. "I just always felt that the safety issue, number one, and I grew up around football and the grass and mud and the smell of those uniforms after the game that you knew a football game was played. So, it was very important to me that we had grass."
Safety, as Davis noted, is the main reason why players so strongly prefer grass. When NFLPA executive director JC Tretter wrote his first argument for grass fields in 2020, he cited league injury data from 2012-18 that showed a 28% higher rate of non-contact lower extremity injuries on turf compared to grass. The data also highlighted that 32% more non-contact knee injuries and 69% more foot/ankle injuries occurred on turf during that seven-year span.
Players also note that turf places more force on the legs and that, anecdotally, they are more sore and require longer recovery time after playing and practicing on turf fields compared to grass surfaces.
NFL pushes back on injury data
The NFL has long held the stance that there is no meaningful difference between turf and grass with regard to injuries. The league pointed out two years, 2021 and 2025, wherein the injury rate across surfaces was nearly identical. NFL field director Nick Pappas made that same claim Tuesday in an appearance on The Dan Patrick Show.
"When we look across injury data, we no longer see this as an injury issue," Pappas said. "In the past, those concerns that turf was driving up the injury rate. When we look at the injury rate and the severity of injury -- and by that I mean the amount of ACLs, the amount of extended time-loss injuries, those real burdensome injuries -- when we look at that, it's a split, grass vs. turf. It becomes just the injury rate of playing football at this point."
"When we look at the injury rate and the severity of injury... it's a split, grass vs turf."
— Dan Patrick Show (@dpshow) July 21, 2026
– NFL field director @NPappas23 on the turf vs grass debate pic.twitter.com/ZCXKFyMods
While advances in turf technology have improved the surface's playability, the numbers the league points out in these arguments are cherry picked. The NFLPA unearthed more data in 2023 that showed the decrease in turf injuries and severity in 2021 was an outlier. Non-contact injuries occurred at a noticeably higher rate on turf in each of the nine prior years, and that rate rebounded again the year after.
The league's position is clear; it does not want to ditch artificial turf. The surface requires less maintenance and offers stadiums the ability to host a variety of non-football events with greater ease and, importantly, at a lower cost. Instead of swapping out the remaining 15 stadiums' fields (14 after Highmark Stadium reopens with natural grass), the league would prefer to push for innovation that makes turf more comfortable.
"From a surface hardness perspective, they're all within the same compliance," Pappas said. "What we're now chasing is how do we get that amount of energy lost to the surface or amount of energy gained back to the surface to feel more like grass? That's the target margin now, unless for some reason we can determine that there is an injury correlation to it. But that's what we hear the players say: They want it to feel more like grass. So that's what we're chasing now."
With the NFL and NFLPA standing on opposite sides of this issue and players' calls for full adoption of natural grass growing louder, this could become a sticking point in negotiations during the next collective bargaining cycle. The current CBA expires after the 2030 season.
