Remember in 2008-9, when Seattle was nearing its MLS debut, how FieldTurf promised the league’s first permanent artificial pitch would play like grass? And how it never did, really, at all? And how it would fall apart far more quickly than pre-installation projections imagined?
In a completely shocking twist, turns out that same company may have been busily defrauding schools and municipalities all over the country in that same period. In an elaborately well-reported three-parter, NJ Advance Media’s Christopher Baxter and Matthew Stanmyre document how FieldTurf hastily sold and installed more than 1,400 ‘Duraspine’ turf fields between 2005 and 2012.