Football is Flooding
In the realm of sports, the battle is meant to be fought between athletes and their opponents. However, recently this has shifted, as there is a new adversary on the horizon that threatens to alter the playing field of sports in unprecedented ways: climate change. Climate change, while technically a natural Earth cycle, is being dramatically catalyzed by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, and industrial processes. These activities release greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide into the atmosphere which act like insulation, preventing heat from the sun from escaping back into space. This insulation has caused significant weather changes and severe weather events such as flooding, drought, heat waves, and hurricanes. As severe climate change related events have become more frequent, it's become clear that sports are not immune to the consequences. Soccer in particular, the world's most popular sport and the beautiful game, has always been closely tied to the elements. Played in stadiums, parks, and streets across the globe, it thrives on the natural conditions of wind, rain, sun, and snow. Yet, the game, like many other aspects of our lives, is now feeling the undeniable impact of climate change. As temperatures rise, sea levels swell, and weather patterns become increasingly unpredictable, soccer is at risk of succumbing to climate change. This paper will explore how various football teams across the globe are being impacted by climate change, how football clubs contribute to climate change, and what football clubs are doing to mitigate this impact.
In 2020, Phil Foden, a midfielder for the club Manchester City, partnered with Xylem, a water solutions firm, to produce an eye opening short film depicting the end of premier league football. The video begins with a young girl taken to her first premier league match at the Etihad, the famous stadium of Manchester City, where she is holding hands with a young Phil Foden as she walks out with him onto the field for the pre-match ritual. The video then quickly cuts to the morning of the match where the young girl sits with her father in the kitchen eating breakfast and watching the news. As the video continues, it intentionally demonstrates the unconscious minor actions of the young girl and those around her as they use an abundance of water. This includes activities such as brushing their teeth, washing dishes and cars, and leaking pipes. Further, when she arrives at the Etihad, the stadium is incredible, and the soccer pitch of Manchester City is flawless; the grass is a vibrant green and perfectly mowed, with not a patch of dirt poking through. However, the video transitions to the future–the young girl has grown up and has a son of her own. They, still living in Manchester, are attending the last Manchester City game ever. Again, the film follows the woman’s day leading up to the match. This time however, the video illustrates short timers on water usage, barren shrubs, and news reports discussing the devastating global drought. As the woman and her son begin their journey to the stadium, the video further illustrates mass advances in technology such as hologramas displaying the starting 11 players for Manchester as well as automation in the stadium for ticket lines. However, once the mother and son enter the stadium, they are met with the harsh reality that the pitch has not been watered in ages, the grass is dead and brown, and patches of dirt litter the field. The world can no longer afford to use water on sports and thus, this is the last game of football to be played in England.
While this video is dramatized, it demonstrates the very harsh reality of the impact global climate change is having on football and what the fate of the game may be with lack of action. Currently, professional football clubs in England are at a large risk of being severely impacted by climate change. A report published by the Athletic, a creditable sports reporting network, concluded that at the current rate of rising temperatures, prolonged periods of drought, destructive storms, and rising sea levels, it is expected that by 2050 a quarter of the 92 Premier League and English Football League clubs can expect partial or total flooding of their stadiums every year (Woosnam, 2022). Of these clubs, some of the largest and most expensive stadiums in existence face risk such as Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge, Southampton’s St Mary’s, West Ham’s London Stadium, and Norwich’s Carrow Road. While the impact on the stadiums at the professional level is clearly disastrous, the impact on smaller, more local, and younger fields is far greater. Fields at the grassroot level which lack the resources and technology to combat climate change will become increasingly poor in quality due to extreme weather events, of which this impact will be felt disproportionately by those in the least developed areas and countries throughout the world. Tom Burke, E3G Third Generation Environmentalism co-founder and a former special advisor to three UK Environment secretaries believes that “climate policy failure means no one is playing football and surviving in 45-degree (celsius) heat. It disrupts people’s ability to enjoy football–equally kids aren’t going to be allowed out to play football if we don’t deal with this problem. There won’t be much grass to play on. Those impacts haven’t been thought through” (Woosman, 2022). Continuing from Burke’s quote, professional and amateur football pitches are not the only part of the beautiful game that stand to be affected by climate change–the players themselves are at the greatest risk to be affected due to the health concerns that coincide with playing in extreme weather. One anecdote of this is highlighted by Sofie Junge Pedersen, the holding midfielder for Juventus in the 2019-2020 season. During their preseason training, Pedersen suddenly found it difficult to continue during training, temperatures had reached 36 degrees celsius (97 degrees fahrenheit), and Pedersen began to feel dizzy while her vision was blurred by black spots. Moments later, she cut short the training session and required ice cubes to properly cool down and restore her vision. Many of her teammates endured a similar experience, failing to complete the session due to the extreme heat, needing external help to cool their core body temperatures down. However, this event was not unique to Juventus, Italy, or even Europe. During Nigeria’s preparation before the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations, winger Samuel Kalu was taken to hospital after collapsing in training because of dehydration, and the Uganda goalkeeper Denis Onyango was taken off on a stretcher after temperatures of up to 36 degrees celsius exacerbated the effects of an earlier illness. This extreme heat, which has only persisted since 2019, is clearly impacting not only the effectiveness of players training, recovery, and performance on the pitch, but the overall health of players and thereby increasing the risk of playing football.
On the other hand, football should not be mistakenly considered as only a victim of climate change. The global football industry reportedly produced 30 million tons of carbon equivalent in the year 2021(Woosnam, 2022). The largest football clubs on the planet including, Manchester City, Bayern Munich, and Barcelona, are responsible for a large percentage of those emissions through club travel, fan travel, powering stadiums, and apparel manufacturing. It has been calculated in Manchester City’s sustainability report that the club emitted 22,161 tons of carbon equivalent in the year 2021, equal to the energy needed to power 5,000 cars for a year or the consumption of 2,493,654 gallons of gasoline (Woosnam, 2022). However, it is important to note that this number is not unique to Manchester City–the largest football clubs in the world also bolster similar emissions which can grow even larger with more matches, further travel, and larger facilities. Furthermore, this number simply accounts for the direct energy Manchester City consumed, thus it does not account for indirect carbon emissions such as traveling fans. A prominent example of fans' impact on the carbon emissions of football can be seen in football's biggest event, the World Cup. When looking specifically at the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the event proved historic for many reasons, one being that it emitted the most carbon emissions of any World Cup in history. The total emissions generated was an estimated 3.63 million tonnes of CO2e, of which French Newspaper Le Monde estimated that, “direct emissions (category 1) were minimal and only accounted for 1% of total emissions, or 35,100 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e). Indirect electricity and fuel consumption emissions directly attributable to the 29-day tournament were almost as small (37,200 tons CO2e) because they were strictly limited to the activities of FIFA and Qatar Organizing Committee staff and volunteers. The bulk of the greenhouse gas emissions belonged to the third category (98%) of indirect emissions, including expected spectators in Qatar – 1.2 million – and the construction of World Cup infrastructures (3.56 million tons CO2e)” (Dagorn, Le Monde). This report clearly demonstrates that the travel and residency of fans through flights, cars, hotels, and other external energy usages, have a significant impact on the emissions generated by football, and therefore are a significant factor when calculating footballs total climate impact. Furthermore, the Qatar World Cup clearly demonstrated that stadiums require a mass amount of energy to be built–though Qatar ignored the large amounts of energy required to sustain them. A report by the Sports Journal, which tracked the amount of energy needed to run every stadium in the Premier League, found that football stadiums consume a significant amount of electricity, with estimates ranging from 15,000 to 30,000 KWh per match (Woosnam, 2022). Further, the report found that in the 2022 Premier League season, Manchester United’s stadium Old Trafford topped the table, requiring 28000 KWh of electricity per game or 532,000 KWh of electricity per season(Woosnam, 2022). Thus, per season the club emits close to 197478.4 kgs of carbon equivalent, which is equal to the usage of 45 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles for one year. However, when multiplied amongst the 19 other teams in the premier league as well as the other top 5 leagues in Europe, the amount of energy needed to run stadiums globally is a monumental figure that continues to rise as clubs become wealthier and begin to expand. Finally, football clubs, while unrecognized in the traditional sense, are massive cult pits of fast fashion. Fast fashion occurs when recent trends and high-fashion designs are mass-produced at low costs and brought to retail stores quickly while demand is at its highest. Though football teams do not directly align within this definition, it is true that football clubs change their kits every year and release special edition jerseys multiple times throughout the season which are mainly manufactured in China and Vietnam and shipped across the world(Woosnam, 2022). While these jerseys are kind tokens for the fans and a prominent source of income for the clubs, this constantly changing landscape of kits requires a massive amount of energy and generates an immense amount of carbon through the production and shipping process, as well as generating an immense amount of waste as unsold jerseys are often left in landfills.
In light of the massive impact football is having on climate change, organizations, clubs, and players are swiftly standing up against polluting practices and implementing long term strategies to become carbon neutral. The most notable example of this is occuring in Gloucestershire, England from Forest Green Rovers FC. The club plays in the EFL League Two against notable opponent Wrexham, and have been recognized by FIFA and the United Nations as the greenest football club on the planet(Woosnam, 2022). The Rovers have taken massive strides since 2010 when they made the decision to prioritize sustainability alongside football; now they set the standard of what a green football club should look like. The Rovers are powered by 100% green energy, some of which is generated onsite from solar panels on the stadium roof and a solar tracker at the ground's entrance. Further, they are the first football club to adopt a completely vegan diet for their players, an effective way to combat climate change as food production, especially the meat and dairy industries, have a massive impact on climate and natural resources. And finally, the club is also combating the emissions of their fans by installing charge points to make it easier for players and visitors to use electric vehicles to get to the matches and by providing a “park-and-ride” scheme to reduce congestion and vehicle emissions.
As the Green Rovers are paving the sustainable path for football, other top clubs with a much larger footprint are following in their footsteps. Arsenal FC, arguably the biggest and best club in England, switched to 100% green electricity back in 2016, and were the first club in the Premier League to sign up for the UN Sports for Climate Action Framework. As a result of these offsetting initiatives, Arsenal Football Club has reportedly eliminated 10.7 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions from their operations since 2016. Furthermore, as noted above, kit changes have caused an unnecessary amount of emissions, as well as create an unnecessary amount of waste. This is why Brentford FC, a newly promoted premier league club, did not release a new home kit this season, citing the need for football to be more sustainable as one of the reasons(Woosnam, 2022). Additionally, to mitigate travel emissions, Tottenham FC in England's Premier League, now travel to matches in biofuel-powered coach buses, thereby reducing their squad coach travel emissions by more than 80%(Woosnam, 2022). Other teams such as Liverpool FC have shared these goals to lower travel emissions and have pledged to decarbonise fuel in the future by using sustainable aviation fuel, which would also lower emissions by 80%(Woosnam, 2022). All of these initiatives, while surely just the beginning of a much larger sustainable transition in the football world, are a step in the right direction for mitigating climate change. Each of these initiatives which reduce carbon, waste, and energy needs, gives us one more day to enjoy the beautiful game that is football.
As can be seen from this article, football is at risk of facing the devastating consequences of climate change due to extreme weather patterns impacting the pitches and players alike. And, while football is contributing to the emissions catalyzing climate change through player and fan travel, stadium erection and maintenance, and kit changes, the action taken today all across the world at the grassroot and professional levels demonstrate a step in the right direction that will allow football to continue to survive and thrive throughout the world. As Arthur-Worsop writes when discussing climate change's impact on football, “we are deep into extra time, but everyone loves an underdog moment and football deals in miracles. Football allows us to have that hope and believe that nothing is impossible” (Woosman, 2022).
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