"The pitch... I don't even know if you can call it that." That's France midfielder Adrien Rabiot, speaking to the BBC after playing a World Cup match at MetLife Stadium. Brazil's Vinicius Junior wasn't far behind, saying the surface dries out in the heat and kills the rhythm of the game entirely.
These aren't players looking for excuses. These are world-class footballers describing a pitch that apparently plays like concrete wearing a grass costume.
MetLife installed temporary grass fields as part of its FIFA agreement to host World Cup matches. Whether that grass sits on top of concrete or dirt remains unclear — but the effect is the same. Hard. Rigid. Wrong. Rabiot's description matches almost exactly what NFL players have said about the venue's usual artificial surface for years.
A stadium with a long injury history
The MetLife injury list reads like a who's who of career-altering moments. According to a report by the Sidwell Health Organization, at least 16 players have suffered serious injuries on the artificial surface. Nick Bosa. Aaron Rodgers. Jabrill Peppers. Sterling Shepard. Wan'Dale Robinson. All ACL or Achilles. Giants receiver Malik Nabers tore his ACL and meniscus there in Week 4 last season.
Odell Beckham Jr., who fractured his ankle on the same turf, went to X and called the stadium "Deathlife." That's not a frustrated player venting — that's someone who lived the consequences.
The economics make a permanent fix difficult. MetLife hosts two NFL franchises, college football, concerts, and major events year-round. A grass surface would absorb punishment and cost a fortune to maintain. The northeast climate doesn't help either — the Giants tried interlocking grass trays at the old Giants Stadium around 1999-2000 and scrapped the experiment fairly quickly for exactly those reasons.
Back to FieldTurf after the final
Once the World Cup wraps up, MetLife returns to its FieldTurf Core surface — the same artificial setup that's been in place since 2023. So the grass that Rabiot and Vinicius couldn't quite believe was grass gets torn out, and the surface that's ended so many NFL careers comes back.
For anyone tracking World Cup match outcomes or tournament outrights, a pitch that disrupts rhythm and favors neither technical football nor physical pressing is worth factoring in. Brazil's second-half sluggishness against a drying surface isn't a trivial complaint — it's a tactical variable that affects how teams perform and, by extension, how games are priced.
Rabiot said he wasn't even sure he could call it a pitch. After everything MetLife Stadium's surface has done to players over the years, that's hard to argue with.
