The Stadium is on Fire
In 2015, English football got a glimpse of the future when the torrential rain accompanying storm Desmond saw Carlisle United’s Brunton Park flooded and the club forced out of the stadium for seven weeks, at considerable financial cost. SandSI (Sport and Sustainability International) caught up with David Goldblatt, football historian, author and moderator of the 1st Football4Climate webinar which featured professional players from Juventus, Sampdoria, Paris Saint-Germain.
What can we expect to be the impact of climate change on football?
In a recently released report Playing Against the Clock: Global Sport, the Climate Emergency and the Case for Rapid Change, published by the Rapid Transition Alliance and Play the Game, I used mapping technology and mainstream climate change models, to see what is going to be happening to European and North America football stadiums over the next few decades.
By 2050 Bordeaux’s Matmut Atlantique stadium will be completely flooded on an annual basis, Werder Bremen’s Weserstadion can expect annual partial floods. In Canada, Toronto FC’s BMO Field will be partly flooded on an annual basis. However, this is as nothing to the fate awaiting the football stadiums of England and the Netherlands.
"Of the 92 league teams in England, 23, almost one in four, can expect partial or total annual flooding of their stadiums by 2050. The four under threat in the current Premier League are Southampton’s St Marys, Norwich’s Carrow Road, Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge and West Ham’s Olympic Stadium."
Seven are at risk in the Championship including Hull City and Cardiff City’s grounds which will both be entirely underwater by 2050. Middlesborough’s Riverside, which will itself avoid flooding, will nonetheless require a flotilla of boats to get fans to the ground across the wide-flooded plains of the city.
Things will be wet in the Netherlands too where the stadiums of Alkmaar Den Haag, Groningen, Heerenveen and Utrecht can look forward to total annual flooding with partial floods for Ajax and Feyenoord."
Even without floods, extreme weather saw more than twenty football english league fixtures cancelled in the 2015/16 season, while Storm Ciara in 2020 which saw the cancellation, in England, of one Premier League game, six Women’s Super League matches and widespread postponements in Dutch football and the top two levels of Belgian football.
What are the concrete dangers of climate change for players?
This kind of weather doesn’t only affect professional sport, but amateur and grassroots sport as well. In England in 2014, the average grassroots pitch lost five weeks per season to bad weather, and a third of these pitches lost between 2 and 3 months in a season.
When it isn’t raining there are going to be some very long very hot days ahead, especially in Africa and the Middle East where daytime football is already often perilous and is set to become impossible.
Once you start hitting 33 to 35 degrees Celsius and you are playing sport, it’s all bad news, and there are going to be a lot more days like that in the global football calendar in the next few decades. Memory, eye hand coordination, and concentration all start suffering, then there are the heat cramps, the heat exhaustion, and the heat stroke.
"When you combine high temperatures with increasing humidity, which will be an increasing reality for much of the world, the impact on football and players and spectators' health is going to be devastating."
How big is the impact of football on climate change?
Football is not just a victim of change, however, but an important contributor too.
"The global football industry has a carbon footprint bigger than Barbados."
Football tournaments are responsible for massive levels of aviation, carbon heavy stadium construction, and mountains of non- recycled garbage, all making a significant contribution to the catastrophe now engulfing us.
So, what is being done, what can be done?
At its best football is already making the change. Forest Green Rovers, in Nailsworth in the west of England, play in League 2, the fourth level of English professional football, but they are the first UN certified carbon zero football club in the world. The club uses 100 per cent renewable energy, has switched to vegan food for staff and fans, installed extensive rainwater recycling, a solar powered lawn mower and plenty of electric vehicle charging points. It now has planning permission to build the first new wooden stadium in Britain for over a century, and the first carbon zero stadium ever.
In Germany both Mainz FC and SC Freiburg have almost a decade of environmental work behind them, pioneering recycling, green waste management and the use of renewable energy in football. Werder Bremen has built one of the largest solar panel arrays in football, introduced ferry services to the stadium to cut down on car use, and has actually banned car parking around the stadium on match days. All three of these clubs encouraged their staff to attend the Friday for Future climate strikes.The French authorities have recently launched their own collective effort - the NGO Football Ecologie France, to make French football carbon zero.
At a global level the UN has created the Sports for Climate Action framework, calling for the sports world to be carbon neutral by 2050. Ahead of last year’s UEFA Champions League Final, a letter was written to European Club Association chairman Andrea Agnelli asking the organisation to discuss the UNFCCC’s Sports for Climate Action Framework with its members at its next General Assembly.
"The response to the call for clubs, federations, leagues to sign up to the Sports for Climate Action Framework has been a trickle rather than a flood. We need everyone to sign up for the framework."
How can we get more football clubs to sign up for the Sports for Climate Action Framework?
This is where initiatives like Football4Climate are playing a role by mobilising football fans to come together around climate action and to demand that their clubs do more and take the lead in the football industry. Members of Football4Climate Fan Club not only unite with other fans around the world to take action for the future of football but also to support their own football clubs in their own climate action efforts.
With enough fans joining the Football4Climate Fan Club, there is a potential to pressure all clubs and national football associations to sign up for the Sports for Climate Action Framework.
"Measuring their carbon footprint should be a requirement for football clubs and nations to participate in international football matches."
How can football, as a single sport, accelerate climate actions globally?
The kind of changes we speak about need to happen in every economic and social sector, in every sphere of our collective lives. Football may be just big enough to register, in terms of carbon emissions, as a small nation state, or a single mega city, but its own efforts are just a fraction of a percentage point of the world total. Yet few human practices offer such an extraordinarily large, global, and socially diverse constituency as those playing and following sport.
"Making a carbon zero world the common sense priority of the football world would make a huge contribution to making it the common sense priority of all politics."
Football, from the street to the stadium, generates hope: that hard work yields the possibility of development; that no cause is lost until the game is actually at an end; that the past tells us miraculous recoveries, turnovers and rallies are possible; that human beings, individually and collectively, have the heart and the wit, when the time comes, to make it happen.
That is a precious set of cultural treasures to hold in trust for the world. If global football is ready to adopt and pursue really radical change in the field of climate action, it might be able to offer them, in all good faith, to humanity…and then you just never know.