Qwest's Field Turf

I have pulled this up from its original posting as it seems like a reference that any reader might want readily available. Any additions that you would like to see please email: bedir [at] hotmail.com

Statement: All artificial surfaces in MLS are the same.
Verdict: False DC United uses SprinTurf on their main practice field, and FC Dallas uses it on 3 of their 17 practice pitches.

Statement: Field Turf is more prone to injure soccer players.
Verdict: Mixed
This depends on what type of injuries. Most studies have shown the following injuries are more common on FieldTurf

Turf toe
Muscle trauma
Turf burn

Whereas on grass surfaces the following injuries are more common

Neural injuries
Ligament injuries
Debris injuries

FieldTurf's injuries threaten games, where as grass threatens careers. These were for American Football, not SOCCER.

This has an update from Finnfan over at GoalSeattle's Forums. I include his response here.

Finding the original articles is indeed a good idea, since the popular press tends to misinterpret scientific results. I reviewed the Swedish and Norwegian studies that were mentioned in your last link. They did not conclude that career ending injuries are more likely on grass as you claimed. On the contrary, one of them concluded that severe injuries were more common on artificial surfaces.

More detailed comments below. Please forgive me about switching into work mode:

The Swedish study was published in December 2007 in British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM), a highly regarded scientific journal with peer review, so it's hard for somebody whose not a scientist in the field to argue against the findings. You can access the article here (there's a link to a PDF-format version in there if you prefer that over the HTML version):
http://bjsm.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/40/12/975

I'm not an expert in this field, but to me as a research scientist their methodology seemed to be sound. This study actually concluded that there is no difference in the injury rate or types of injuries between artificial turf and grass.

The main source of funding for this study was UEFA, who of course has a vested interest in seeing the results that were found in this study, but thinking that this reduces the credibility of this study is far-fetched, because it was published in a highly respected peer-reviewed scientific journal.

Note that this study was on third generation surfaces. Not surprisingly, in the paper there are references to papers that studied first and second generation surface, and concluded that the injury rate was much higher on them than on grass.

The abstracts of the conference papers that are mentioned in the same article can be found here (numbers 013 and 014 on page 5):
http://www.ostrc.no/upload/Congress2008/Abstracts of the Troms congress_BJSM 2008.pdf

You can even listen to the presentation and view the slides from paper 013 (the one on youth players):
http://video.nih.no/Congress2008/26C_15.00_Soligard/26C_15.00_Soligard.htm

The other presentation is not available, and neither are the full papers, unfortunately.

As you can easily read from the abstracts, both of the papers conclude that there is no difference in injury risk between third generation artificial turf and grass. The study on professional footballers concluded that severe injuries were more common on artificial surfaces, and mild injuries were more common on grass. I did not find any comments on career ending injuries.

Statement:Those studies just paid attention to American Football and not the world's game.
Verdict: False
The earliest studies were in fact done on high school football players, but subsequent studies have measured the effects on men's and women's collegiate soccer, as well as a study in Sweden for their league's players.

Statement: Major players don't want to play on FieldTurf.
Verdict: Mixed
While Beckham, Huckerby and several CSA players have stated that they don't like FieldTurf. Players such as Freddie Ljungberg have not objected to it.

Statement: Real Soccer countries don't play on Field Turf.
Verdict: False
40% of the U-20 World Cup in Canada to include the Finals were played on FieldTurf. Saprissa Stadium in Costa Rica is FieldTurf. Luzhniki Stadium in Moscow Russia is a Field Turf Stadium. Lastly, for the earlier referenced study of Swedish players it is obvious that several of their fields are Field Turf.

I don't know where best to put this, but several matches in Scotland were delayed due to frozen grass turf fields this last week. These were in the SPL, SL1 and in Scottish Cup action.

The fact is that FIFA will and has allowed FieldTurf surfaces and they are becoming more common, not less. Overtime we should all expect to see it in the World Cup Finals at some point, but this does not mean that the technology can settle. The ball does play a bit differently, and that needs to be fixed and the bounce of the ball is dramatically different depending on the generation of the FieldTurf being used (Qwest had an update last spring). But it is certainly an adequate surface, and is preferable to situations like the NFL game at Heinz Field which resulted in inches of standing water and mud.