The football industry, like all industries, needs to continue advancing to reduce CO2 emissions, but the actors in the world’s most popular sport also have an opportunity to inspire wider change, an opportunity that most other companies and sectors don’t have.
At the 2022 World Football Summit, held in September in Seville, the football industry’s role in promoting sustainability awareness was a hot topic, especially in the talks titled ‘Sustainability and Sport: A Call to Action’ and ‘Need of the Game: What are the best steps to make football sustainable?’.
There were several high-profile speakers sharing their insights across these talks, one of whom was Real Betis’ general business director Ramon Alarcón. He shared some details of his club’s ‘Forever Green’ project and the fact that the LaLiga Santander side committed in 2019 to the ‘Climate Neutral Now’ initiative from the United Nations.
Alarcón highlighted just how much power football clubs have by sharing a story from the COP25 event. He said: “We were invited to COP25 in Madrid and the feedback was that the awareness a football team created in this programme was incredible. They told us many companies were enrolled in this program before us, but that when Real Betis started to talk about environmental issues the awareness increased a lot.”
Many of the other speakers at the World Football Summit echoed this sentiment, sharing their own experiences of how sport can make more of a difference than other businesses. Dale Vince, the owner of English side Forest Green Rovers, the world's first vegan football club, said: “What we try to do is to show our fans that there is a different way to live, that actually there are things we do that they could also do, in part or in full, and we do this through the medium of football. Football is an amazing opportunity and platform to speak to people because fans look up to clubs and to players. Football doesn't have a bigger responsibility than any other business to sort out its own impact on the environment, but it has an opportunity that almost no other business on the planet has. That opportunity is to engage with fans.”
Even in other sports, there is a similar reach. As Julia Pallé, the sustainability director of Formula E, stated: “The power of sports is not so much about what we can do with our impact on the environmental or the social footprint. It's what we can inspire our fandom to do. 80 percent of what we can do is inspiring these billions of people that follow sports, because they don't listen to science. However, they are being captivated by our athletes and by the simple messages that our sport can send.”
The importance of sharing best practice
Fiona Bull, the head of physical activity at the World Health Organization, also spoke about sustainability, in a more general sense, at the conference. She urged clubs that have had success to share their tips with others at meetings, which is a common practice in LaLiga as Spanish clubs embrace knowledge sharing in this field.
Bull said: “At all levels of sport, the stadia and the infrastructure and the ecosystem are really powerful. But, have we really captured that impact it could have? Are we working together to target and reach the goals we've set. We have solutions, but we haven’t shared those solutions enough. I think there are many existing efforts and actions across the world, particularly across Europe, but football clubs need to share them, or one regret will be duplication and repetition of things that don't work. We need to find and share the successes, what we call best practice.”
The programmes at LaLiga clubs that are inspiring fans
There are many initiatives currently in place at LaLiga clubs, including the aforementioned ‘Forever Green’ project at Real Betis. More than being one scheme, ‘Forever Green’ is more about an overall way of thinking and living, focused on mobility, recycling, climate change, nature and being an overall sustainable club.
“The climate crisis is a threat because the climate issues are really bad, but this threat should also become an opportunity because if you do things in the right way and you put green issues in the mindset of your company, you can become a great company,” Alarcón added when explaining why Real Betis decided to completely embrace this sustainability mindset.
Many other clubs throughout LaLiga have also been working on interesting sustainability projects, always with the joint aims of making a real difference and of inspiring supporters to do likewise. As well as the visible recycling points in place at most stadiums, there have been some other creative recycling initiatives. For example, Real Sociedad have a project called ‘Sareak’, in which they reuse abandoned nets from the sea and transform them into football goal nets. At RC Celta, meanwhile, they have recycled the banners placed over stadium seats during the pandemic to make these canvases into bags.
Other projects focus on the emissions built up from the travelling involved in football. At the end of each season, Athletic Club calculate the level of CO2 emissions generated during the season and trees and bushes are planted over the course of the following season to compensate for the club’s carbon footprint. Real Zaragoza have a similar project, whereby they make donations to reforestation projects in Nicaragua based on calculations of their CO2 emissions, while they also try to lower these in the first place by using buses and trains where possible, instead of flying.
All across Spanish football there are clubs with similarly important sustainability initiatives, all of which make the most of football’s amazing platform by inspiring fans to implement changes of their own.