When the U.S. women’s soccer team launched its quest for a World Cup Monday night against Australia, there were 30,000 fans in the stands at Winnipeg Stadium— but not a single blade of grass on the field.

Despite their protests, the best female soccer players in the world are being forced to play all the games of the 2015 Women’s World Cup on artificial turf.

“It’s kind of a nightmare,” said star U.S. forward Abby Wambach. She said that playing on turf “affects everything” from the way the ball bounces to the bloody “turf burns” the surface leaves on legs and arms.

All the tournament’s fields — six surfaces in six cities — are made of turf. Wambach and players from Germany, Brazil and Spain filed a lawsuit in Canada last year that demanded FIFA and the Canadian Soccer Association install natural grass in the arenas, but the players said they dropped the suit earlier this year because they had filed it too late and FIFA wouldn’t budge.

This Women’s World Cup will be the first ever played on turf, and according to Wambach no major men’s tournament has ever been played on turf.

“FIFA and CSA never would have forced a men’s World Cup onto plastic pitches,” said Hampton Dellinger, who represented the players in their lawsuit. “FIFA and Canadian officials’ refusal to do right by the women’s game has been enabled by the actions or silence of leading national federations.”

Want to know more? Got the drop at MSNBC . . .