1,000 signatures reached
To: NFL, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, NFL team owners
Stop the corporate greed. Protect players and use real grass, NOT TURF!
In December, More Perfect Union reported that NFL stadiums will use grass for the 2026 FIFA World Cup games hosted in football stadiums. And the truth is, they’re using taxpayer dollars to pay for it, only to return to using turf after the games are over.
Football players are 28% more likely to suffer lower body injuries on turf than on grass, but billionaire owners of NFL teams refuse to listen, putting players in danger. Enough is enough! We must come together to stop this corporate greed.
Will you sign the petition demanding that all NFL teams use grass, not turf, to protect their players?
Why is this important?
Out of 30 NFL teams, 14 use real grass, 14 use artificial turf, and 2 use a hybrid field of grass and artificial materials. It would only cost the NFL 12 million dollars to replace the current turf fields to grass, compared to the nearly $12 billion dollars in revenue that the NFL made in 2023.
And that’s not all: Over the last 8 years alone, the NFL has made over 74 BILLION dollars in revenue. Yet, many NFL team owners (30 out of 32 of whom are billionaires and have a combined net worth of over 260 BILLION DOLLARS) would rather prioritize their corporate profits over their players’ safety.
For over a decade, NFL players themselves have been very vocal about how much of a toll turf takes on their bodies, and how they dread games where they know they will be playing on turf. The National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), the labor union that represents NFL players, has been advocating for grass fields despite the league’s PR attempts to defend the use of artificial turf.
The NFL has a history of putting corporate profits above players:
• In the 2000s, Dr. Bennet Omalu discovered a link between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) , a degenerative brain disease caused by repeated blows to the head causing concussions. But instead of thinking of ways they could protect their players, the NFL went after Omalu and other scientists studying CTE. After nearly a decade of denial and suppressing scientific evidence, the NFL finally admitted the truth: There is a link between football and CTE.
• Back in 2021, after shamefully using “race-norming” which prevented hundreds of Black football players with dementia from qualifying for awards in a $1 billion settlement of concussion clamps, the NFL agreed to end this practice.
• The NFL has continued to come under fire for their lack of guaranteed contracts for players. The sham contracts offered by the NFL give so many outs for the corporation that players rarely see the full payouts from their deals. Meanwhile, every other major league in professional sports has guaranteed contracts. This is greed and exploitative, plain and simple, and it's costing players.
And these are just a few examples. The NFL must do better and put player safety above corporate profits NOW. Add your name to the petition.