The Old Synthetic Turf Argument

Revisiting a classic fight

The Old Synthetic Turf Argument

I grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As a result, the old days of artificial turf still are special to me.

There’s something eerie about watching those old artificial turf games. The cookie cutter stadiums that used those fields tended to separate the fans from the field as much as possible, giving the impression that the players were completely isolated from everybody else. That, combined with the green glow of the field (particularly in outdoor stadiums), gives you the impression that these games were played on a different planet.

But that’s not what the controversy was.

In the January 1999 issue of RISK: Health, Safety & Environment, Allan Mazur and Jennifer Bretsch looked back at the major controversy of the time: whether the space age turf was contributing to additional player injuries.

Actually, that controversy went back almost as far as the first installation of the turf. Astroturf was installed in the Astrodome in Houston in 1966; by 1971, researchers suspected that the turf was causing injuries:

As was later the case with CTE studies connected with the NFL, however, studies started to contradict each other, and the science was not entirely clear. Rhetoric and commercial interests took precedence over science:

In the end, as games played increased and the data sets grew, the results were a bit more visible. It turns out that there was an impact on knee injuries, but the overall scope of that increase itself was not entirely clear:

Of course, technology has improved a lot over the years. These days, according to this New York Times article, around half the teams in the NFL have synthetic turf stadiums — and yet there seems to be no impact on injuries.