Chelsea 3 - Tottenham NetZero

As a West Ham fan I usually like to laugh at Tottenham, whether that is because their star man is desperate to get out, they forever bottle matches creating the term “Spursy”, or just because they have a massive cockerel on their badge.

But, surprisingly Tottenham have evoked the emotion of jealousy in me recently, not only for having a wonderful stadium that doesn’t require binoculars to see the players, but more recently being involved in the “world’s first major net zero carbon football game”.

As a wannabee “Super League” club and therefore the epitome of footballing evil, I decided to cast a skeptical eye over just how green this match was? The carbon challenges football has, and most importantly, what more needs to be done.

Carbon and Football

A report by Rapid Transition Alliance estimated that within the next three decades a quarter of English football grounds – including Chelsea, Fulham, West Ham and Southampton – will be at risk of annual flooding.

So how is football contributing to its own demise?

Travel

As the pandemic thaws and travel is back on the agenda clubs need to consider not only their own transport methods (taking a 14-minute flight from London to Norfolk), but that of fans especially with even more European football taking place.

The Champions League Final between Liverpool and Tottenham in 2019 (which Tottenham lost) produced more emissions that day that the entire city of Cop 26 host Glasgow, largely because the match was hosted in Madrid. From a sustainability prospective there is no justification for making teams from the same country play games further ashore.

The creation of a new competition: Europa Conference League (which Tottenham have the dubious honor of representing having failed to qualify for the Europa League) will add a further 131 matches to an already crammed flight path of football including two matches between FC Basel and Kairat Almaty which is over 3,000 miles away.

Whilst I commend UEFA in creating a tournament aimed at providing additional revenue to European clubs could a more sustainable tournament structure of been devised rather than the traditional method?

Energy

The 2022 World Cup claims it will be carbon neutral as they are planning to offset the 3.6 million tonnes of Carbon Dioxide they estimate the tournament will produce. There are many energy intensive activities make up that number with infrastructure construction and operational elements making up 24%. On the plus side it has been good to see a plan set out around the stadium's sustainability to hopefully avoid the abandoned stadiums of previous tournaments.

Stadiums require a lot of energy to run, whether it is in London to heat up a cold mid-week match or air-conditioning in Qatar.

Currently in the Premier League it is unclear how green the energy used to power stadiums is. If they are using Electricity then that will be coming from the grid that just provides electrons from whatever sources are generating at that time. If stadiums are heated via gas then that is going to produce a lot of carbon.

Sponsorship

There are clubs owned by energy companies (Zenit owned by Gazprom) and petrostates (Man City / PSG) as well as clubs sponsored by companies representing high-carbon goods and services such as airlines.

Clubs and football should give stronger weight behind the green values of any company, product, or service they associate with. Given the huge influence power football and the clubs have, it has a fantastic opportunity to promote companies with concrete green credentials.

Truly a net zero match?

Unlikely.

Measurement

First the method behind the calculation on how much carbon emissions the match generated hasn't been disclosed, have they considered all emissions as a consequence of the match?

I doubt it, it is easy to overlook emissions as they are not always straightforward and obvious, someone checking their fantasy football because Mendy was a no-show is an example. Indeed, Sky told CNN they measured the baseline emissions for a Premier League game.

Measurement and baselining is such a key early aspect of any net-zero activity because if you do not know what the current or future output will be then how do you know how much to offset.

Match Day Emissions

Although encouragement was made to see people arrive in a more sustainable method with some sky reporters cycling to the stadium, it should be noted there are around 3,000 spaces for bikes at a stadium of hosting over 60,000. As well as encouragement to use public transport, these buses are still running on Diesel and polluting the air. However, this is still a positive step.

Also considerable effort was put into sustainable food at the stadium. Let's hope the food arrived in a sustainable method to the stadium and all leftovers will be sent to a processing plant rather than landfill.

Finally let's consider every eye fixated to an energy consuming device, a TV to watch the game or a smartphone to check the Tottenham twitter-sphere meltdown occurring as Chelsea score another goal. Beyond electrical devices there is the computing systems supporting real time analytics and broadcasting equipment and networks that make the sharing of this spectacle possible - all of these come with a footprint.

Carbon offsetting

There has been acknowledgement that carbon will be produced as an outcome of this match but the plan is to offset this carbon with activities such as planting trees.

But will they be over-provisioning their planting of trees? Many trees planted fail to grow to maturity and there are some example of offsetting schemes catching fire and burning down.

So it is important not to take offsetting for granted and see it as one for one. The potential to remove carbon out of the atmosphere in the future does not equate to the very real carbon being put into the atmosphere at present.

It is critical to reduce carbon emissions wherever possible. Of course offsetting has an important role to play but again a failure to provide detailed information means it is difficult to understand if the appropriate provision has been made.

What more can be done?

Transparency

As eluded to above, transparency is key. Not so people can look in detail and point out flaws and make the accusation of green-washing, but instead to learn from each other and do even better next time.

We are at the infancy of concrete actions against carbon emissions and there should be an acceptance we are not going to get it 100% right first time. By providing transparency it affords the opportunity to include any emissions that were missed this time to be included next time as well as helping to identify the most successful aspects of the initiative.

Change the growth mindset

Away from this specific match and instead looking at the football / sport industry on the whole there needs to be a mindset change because the current mindset is incongruous with the climate ambition that is needed to save the planet.

Everything in football is about growth, more European competitions, more countries participating in the world cup, more matches added to the footballing calendar. This somewhere down the line needs to stop. Acceptance (or even reduction) of the existing calendar and consider how we can do more sustainably first, before adding more to the mix.

There needs to be more incentives made to individual clubs so they play their part as relying on clubs to move in this direction will be too slow.

Imagine if points were up for grabs for meeting sustainability targets, if that was the case I am positive that clubs would be actively addressing their governance by appointing Sustainability Managers and consequently adapting Operational Actions (renewable energies, low consumption technologies) to ensure targets were met. Until sustainability counts as much as a goal does it is unlikely to have the same focus.

Final thoughts

All in all I think the weekends coverage of the match was fantastic and initiatives like this with the eyes that football brings demonstrate a willingness to begin to implement concrete actions. But let's go further quicker, now there has been a demonstration of one match can be net-zero (kind of), let's make every match in the Premier League net-zero so I can stop being jealous of Tottenham's green credentials.

P.S. Forrest Green Rovers are the leaders in this space in the UK not Tottenham ;) check out what they are doing below.