An Unplayable Game

Football drifts ever further into the unknown

As floods batter southern Brazil, communities around the world boil in 40°C+ heat, and climate scientists frantically expand their Y-axis, it feels as if humanity is stepping into uncharted territory; unaware and fundamentally unprepared. 

I - like many other avid readers of this newsletter - have always felt that football could offer an anchor amid this discontinuity, providing community, connection and friendship that would help us navigate what lies ahead. These are qualities we desperately need, whether we reach a net-zero utopia or we slowly slide into a world of more instability, upheaval and suffering. 

But with the images of flooded stadia, abandoned fixtures, and the proliferation of playing temperatures that will kill, I cannot help but feel the fabric of the game is being unpicked before our very eyes. There is little doubt that football, at every level, continues to be organised and run as if we still had the climate of the 20th century. But we don’t. That climate no longer exists. 

And while we might mourn the loss of the climate in which football mesmerised all of us, the game drifts ever further into the unknown. The only certainty is that football’s future - much like humanity’s - will be radically different from its past. 

Leadership is almost non-existent, particularly from the organisations responsible for overseeing the game and ensuring its future. In fact, those at the top of the global game appear to be adding fuel to the fire.  

Last month, FIFA, at the top of global football, announced a ‘major’ partnership with Saudi Aramco, the biggest fossil fuel enterprise on earth responsible for almost 5 percent of all global emissions since 2016. The deal will, according to FIFA, help make football a ‘truly global game’. But when climate breakdown is making large parts of the world inhospitable to life - let alone football - you have to ask: what’s global? 

FIFA’s Congress will kick off next week in Bangkok, Thailand, where temperatures have just topped 43°C. Again, records have been shattered and “climatic history rewritten”. We all get to experience the anomalous become commonplace. Unicef reported that more than 10 million children in Thailand have been impacted by extreme heat in 2020 alone. By 2050, every single child in Thailand will be affected under current emissions trajectories. Will their voices - the football fans and future stars - be heard in the air-conditioned halls of the FIFA Congress? 

Instead of leadership, we get sound bites and photo ops. Green cards held up to cameras and promises to be ‘net zero’ by 2040 mask vacuity. There is no sign of substance nor any sense of duty. Even the Qatar World Cup in 2022, which promised to be the ‘first ever carbon neutral World Cup’, failed to report on the actual observed emissions from the tournament. 

Expansion is the only game in town. In an effort to take some of UEFA’s pie, the FIFA club World Cup will feature 32 football clubs and grace the USA next year. At the youth level, the men’s and women’s under 17s World Cup, which was quietly expanded to 48 national teams, will now take place annually from 2025 to 2029. Despite some of the best players in the world having spoken out, time and time again, about the physical and mental toll of an already congested fixture schedule, expansion is still the play. But these players cannot bend any further to meet these demands - or they will break. It is no surprise that player’s unions are threatening legal action.  

But in a vacuum of leadership, alternatives can sometimes germinate. 

At the grassroots level, a loudening chorus of clubs are raising the alarm on conditions and the financial toll climate disruption takes. Some clubs are speaking to the intertwined crisis of climate and inequality with a humility and eloquence that surely would make Infantino blush. Others, like Dublin’s Bohemians FC, are building a space where their fans actively shape the energy transition.  

All this begs the question of whether football and fans can rely on FIFA to safeguard their future in the years ahead. Or, in fact, FIFA’s position at the top of the global game is accelerating football’s precarity. If the Aramco deal is anything to go by, I’m beginning to think so. 

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Freddie Daley runs the Cool Down Sport For Climate Action Network and is an academic at the University of Sussex. You can follow him on Twitter here and connect on LinkedIn.

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