It isn’t news that players don’t like to play on artificial turf, and so it wasn’t shocking that Zlatan Ibrahimovic refused to travel to Seattle to play on their turf field last weekend.



The Swede is not the first big name to sit out games on an artificial surface in MLS; Thierry Henry, Didier Drogba, and David Beckham all criticized the use of turf fields in the league. But when superstars talk—and especially when superstars sit out to save their bodies at the expense of their teams—it brings attention to an issue that frankly should be a bigger part of the daily conversation.



And it’s not just about turf.



Sebastian Giovinco has complained about the pitch at Toronto’s BMO Field, most recently last Saturday night, when he told reporters that the the presence of too much sand, together with the field’s use by Toronto FC II and the Canadian football Argonauts, had degraded the surface to the point that it was...