Last year, over 40 of the FIFA Women’s World Cup players from twelve different countries filed a gender discrimination lawsuit against FIFA. The gist of the lawsuit was that no World Cup in the men’s game has been played on an artificial grass, a surface that poses a number of health and injury risks. While artificial turf is easier and more cost-efficient to maintain, the player experience is exponentially worse than natural grass. The group of players proposed FIFA change a number of the locations to stadiums in Canada with real grass. However, FIFA never budged, and they retracted their lawsuit.
Rachel Maddow recently reported that FIFA has vowed to never use turf for any future World Cups, so in a way, these women just have to get through this one.
But, that will first entail extremely harsh field conditions. The first game of the Women’s World Cup, Canada versus China in Edmonton, was played on a temperate 75-degree day. The playing surface, though, was a scalding 120 degrees. This temperature is not dissimilar from that of the conditions in the future Men’s 2022 World Cup in Qatar, of which FIFA is taking a considerable amount of criticism.
The heat is only the beginning, as United States women’s national team doctor, Dr. Bojan Žorić, explained to Sports Illustrated the very real injury and health concerns.
The body is by far more fatigued, there’s a longer recovery rate, there’s certainly more of a feeling of being worn down after practicing and playing on turf,” Žorić said.
All of this full body wear and tear comes in addition to the surface level injury of turf burn, made famous by a tweeted picture from U.S. forward Sydney Leroux. The mere act of slide tackling or diving on artificial grass may land a player with a sizeable, bloody rash.
This is why soccer should be played on grass! pic.twitter.com/fsNGi27oRY
— Sydney Leroux Dwyer (@sydneyleroux) April 15, 2013
Now, five of Major League Soccer’s 20 teams use turf fields, one of those being the Vancouver Whitecaps FC, whose BC Place is a venue for the Women’s World Cup.
L.A. Galaxy head coach Bruce Arena is famed critic of the stadium, and more generally, turf in soccer.
“They (turf fields) are disasters,” Arena said to The Washington Post’s Steven Goff. “The only one that is somewhat acceptable is Portland. The others are all terrible. Seattle is bad. Vancouver is probably the worst. And New England isn’t good.”
Interestingly, the one artificial field that is readily acknowledged by many as the best in Major League Soccer, Portland’s JELD-WEN Field, is made by FieldTurf, a company that is responsible for three of the six venues for the Women’s World Cup. These cities are Ottawa, Moncton and Winnipeg. These stadia hold FieldTurf’s Optimum artificial turf system, along with their Coolplay infill system, which should allow for a bit less hot of a surface for the women to play on. FieldTurf states that their fields benefit from possessing “multi-ridged monofilament fibre, a unique yarn that is both highly resilient and soft and a patented three-layer infill.”
But, at the end of the day, all of this technology cannot match the benefits of playing on well-kept grass. Most women’s soccer players would agree that turf is still turf.