Turf Wars: Each NFL Team Has Its Own Multimillion-Dollar Calculus
This is the second story in Sportico’sTurf Wars series, examining the business decisions behind choosing natural grass or artificial turf for an NFL stadium.
Denver Broncos executives were watching the team’s home game against the Arizona Cardinals on Dec. 18, 2022, when they realized they had a problem: The grass at their stadium was no longer up to snuff.
“It was a combination of players slipping, or the chunks of grass that come up when a player cuts,” team president Damani Leech said in a recent interview. “The surface just didn’t appear to be holding up in a way that we felt comfortable with.”
The team took a radical step. After brief conversations between coaches, executives and the franchise’s new owners, the Broncos replaced the entire surface, at a cost of roughly $400,000, for the final game of the season. Sod was trucked in from Arizona and laid in Empower Field at Mile High just a few days before the last-place team ended its season against the Chargers. It was used for one NFL game, then replaced again before the 2023 season started.
The move stands out as a notable chapter in a growing issue across the world’s richest sports league. The debate over natural grass vs. artificial turf has simmered for decades, but it’s become more contentious in recent years as franchise valuations soar and players become more vocal about their preference for grass.
This season, 17 teams will play home games on artificial turf, and 15 will play on natural grass, including the Green Bay Packers, who play on a hybrid field—though it’s hard to imagine NFL Films hyping up the “frozen synthetic and grass tundra of Lambeau Field” any time soon.
As the NFL and union collaborate to create a league-wide standard for surfaces, a process outlined in the first story in this Sportico series, the two sides continue to disagree on whether artificial turf leads to more injuries. Last year, NFLPA executive director Lloyd Howell called for all teams to switch to natural grass. The debate is driving strategic investments and influencing stadium design. It even popped up at the Super Bowl, the league’s most important game.
For now, teams are largely free to use whatever surface they’d like. The Broncos—whose ownership group, led by Walmart’s Walton family, is the richest in the NFL—believe grass is best for them. And sometimes that might require a late-season scramble, which we saw at the end of 2022.
“It definitely set the tone across the organization about what this ownership group is about: focused on winning and willing to spend the money,” Leech said. “You’re not just saying it, you’re putting players in an environment that helps with their health and safety.”
