In sports that were originally or are normally played on grass, artificial turf is a grass-like playing surface manufactured from synthetic materials.

Artificial turf first came to prominence in 1965, when AstroTurf was installed in the newly-built Astrodome in Houston, Texas. The use of AstroTurf and similar surfaces such as 3M's "TartanTurf" and "Poly Turf" became widespread in the 1970s and was installed in both indoor and outdoor stadiums used for baseball and football in the United States and Canada. Maintaining a grass playing surface indoors, while technically possible, is prohibitively expensive, while teams which chose to play on artificial surfaces outdoors did so because even outdoors the clubs believed that maintaining a grass surface to the increasingly high standards demanded by leagues, players and even fans was often still far more expensive than installing and maintaining artificial turf - especially in colder climates and urban multi-purpose "cookie cutter" stadium such as Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium, Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium and Philadelphia's Veterans Stadium just to name a few.