Elite football is built from the grassroots up: executives must take the climate threat seriously

By Peter Crisp, Fossil Free Football

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Football bosses see their role as ‘growing the game’ by capturing new fans and deepening existing loyalties. They measure the health of the sport through attendances, viewing figures and revenue flows. This focus on next year’s profits means they have been only too happy to act as a billboard for a fossil fuel industry seeking to normalise its pollution despite the climate crisis. 

But the desire to drive short term commercial success is blinding football’s key decision makers to the existential threat football faces from a hotter and less stable climate. Instead, longer term thinking that prioritises the future feasibility of the sport is urgently needed. 

Executives throughout the game have been happy to embrace polluting industries in exchange for lucrative sponsorship deals. In fact, the marketing messages of fossil fuel dependent corporations are impossible to avoid in modern football. Our recent report laid bare the extent of harmful sponsorship in the Premier League, the top flight of English football, whose billions of viewers are exposed to advertising from airlines, polluting car makers, fossil fuel financing banks, cruise lines and long-haul travel destinations. 

Almost all clubs are involved, including Arsenal (Emirates), Liverpool (Standard Chartered), Man. City (Etihad Airways). Importantly, even clubs that have made sustainability part of their ‘brand’, such as Tottenham, have chosen to partner with arms of mega-polluters like BP. Elsewhere, we are campaigning against FIFA's decision to promote the Saudi state owned oil corporation, Aramco, the most polluting company of all time, at (at least) the next two World Cups. Together with partners Badvertising and Game Changer we have also highlighted the volume of polluting sponsorship in the Champions League, European Championships and Copa America. 

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As football fans, we fear that these decisions will enrich the owners of football clubs (including autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia) and their corporate sponsors in the short term, but that ordinary fans will suffer the consequences as the climate crisis bites. 

Grassroots sport is the foundation on which the rest of the game is built. Amateur clubs depend on a safe environment and cohesive communities but a more unstable and extreme climate will upset the conditions that football needs to sustain itself. Thousands of matches are already cancelled each season as record rainfall stops play. Elsewhere, extreme heat narrows the window in which teams can train and compete. More fundamentally, the instability that threatens to upend communities amidst the climate crisis further erodes the social and financial resources needed to commit to grassroots sports clubs. 

Despite the overwhelming attention paid to the top levels, the sport is only as healthy as the first rungs of the ladder, which form essential steps for anyone to reach the professional elite. Football fans invariably fall in love with the game as they kick a ball with their friends at school, in the park, or in their first junior matches. But a climate marked by fierce heat or flooding rain will mean fewer young players take their first steps on the road to a professional career. 

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More broadly, young kids won’t turn into football fans if they struggle to play the game themselves in their early years. Football business experts know that in the modern world, the teenagers they are hoping to turn into diehard fans are overwhelmed with distraction and choice. Streaming services, social media and video games are all competing with football for the attention of the youngest generation of consumers. But as extreme weather keeps more and more kids inside, there are a world of alternatives waiting to take their attention away from football.

The fossil fuel industry uses advertising in football to cling onto its normalised place in society. But by allowing constant promotion of pollution, football administrators have abdicated their responsibility to safeguard the future of the sport. Football must therefore not only step away from fossil fuels but speak out forcefully to ensure fans understand the threat the climate crisis brings.