How green (apart from the obvious) is football? The Euros may be a sporting triumph - but they're an eco-disaster
The A/UK’s households have been no less gripped than yours by this years’ Euro 2020 (a Covid year late) international football tournament. It’s great entertainment, if you love the beautiful game. But ecologically, in terms of carbon generated by the tournament, it’s definitely “early doors” for soccer.
We were only slightly disgruntled to find these excellent articles from the Rapid Transition Alliance’s newsletter which doggedly point out just how egregious top-flight footy is when it comes to their carbon emissions. From John Nicholson’s the Greening of Football (first published on Football365), we find out that:
The average per person in the EU is 8.7 tonnes per year per person according to the European Environment Agency, but to slow down and halt climate change, that needs to be 0.6 tonnes or less. Not in 10 or 20 years’ time, but now. Today.
But every Chelsea player was responsible for that amount just by flying to play Rennes in the Champions League group stage. A report in November 2019 found air travel by the top 20 footballers nominated for the Ballon d'Or that year was responsible for producing 505 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
As for the Euros:
The total carbon footprint of the Euro 2016 finals was 2.8million tonnes, equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of 282,500 Europeans according to their calculations. And that tournament was held entirely in France…
The decision to play Euro 2020 in many different countries necessitating ferrying people by plane all over the continent attracted widespread environmental criticism, and rightly so. It was and is a ludicrous and totally unnecessary idea.
UEFA is offsetting aviation emissions from Euro 2020 out of its own budget by investing in reforestation projects. While this sounds good, the reality is different.
First, planting trees is all well and good, but it’ll take 20 years for it to grow and start delivering on its offsetting goals. We might not have 20 years.
Furthermore, Anja Kollmuss, a policy analyst in Zurich who studies emissions trading has said most offsets being sold by brokers, businesses and governments don’t deliver the emissions reductions they promise: “There are many more bad offsets than there are good offsets.”
In any case, offsetting does not encourage the reduction of emissions; indeed, they remove the need to do so. This isn’t supposed to be an exercise in getting out of doing the right thing, it’s about actually doing the right thing.
While offsetting may have some role to play in the transition from the fossil fuel economy to a green economy, it would be far simpler and far more effective to require clubs not to fly at all and not to play European football on such a scale.
This is the part where a collective intake of breath may be heard. Yet Nicholson makes the point that football can’t evade the critiques of heedless air transport around Europe and the world. He makes a valiant case for the “relocalising” of football, the sustainable credentials of clubs like Forest Green Rovers, the establishment of new regional leagues.
But as football fans luxuriate in the cosmopolitan pool of skills available in international/continental tournaments, Nicholson’s ideas are an indicator of the range of lifestyle shocks to come, as we reckon with climate catastrophe. It’s hard not to see a rather brutal collision between green activism and a popular culture of fantasy football up ahead.
The second RTA piece is from their director Andrew Simms, writing in May, and with a range of mid-level initiatives that might buffer the crunch:
It’s not just about football acting responsibly, the game has its own self-interested reasons to act which could also improve accessibility and the experience for fans. Sports events already are being hit and cancelled increasingly due to extreme weather events. Within the next three decades one quarter of English Football League grounds will be at risk from flooding every season.
And, something wider is stirring in the game to push for rapid change. New groups like Pledgeball are already working with fans and clubs to change behaviour and cut emissions. Its founder, Katie Cross, points out: “On average, 70% of carbon emissions from a single fixture come from fan travel. Moving the final to England will, therefore, significantly reduce the carbon footprint of the final and demonstrate the impact of fan behaviour on match day and beyond.”
Other groups like Spirit of Football will be using future World Cups as platforms to argue for a major shift in the game. Football for Future, is a brand new campaign and founder, Elliot Arthur-Worsop, believes that a greener sport could also make things better for supporters. “Localising venues significantly reduces travel emissions and makes matches more convenient for fans,” he says. “Not all supporters can afford to follow their club across continents, and younger supporters might have to sacrifice multiple days off school to watch their team for just 90 minutes.”
We should note that the RTA brought out a major report last year, authored by the sports academic David Greenblatt, titled Playing against the clock: Global sport, the climate emergency and the case for rapid change - which is full of excellent stats and analysis.