Is English football hurtling towards a ‘climate doom loop’?

Football is facing a future of constant disruption

Cycles are nothing new in football. Periods of good form give way to bad spells. More often than not, these periods are then compounded by injuries, insults and injustices. Disgruntled fans are eventually soothed by a string of results. Fortunes turn.

The legendary Gennaro Gattuso distilled the cyclical nature of football best when he described his OFI Crete team’s performance as “sometimes maybe good. Sometimes maybe s***”. Football’s state is one of flux, oscillating between these two poles constantly.

But these cycles - the good times and the bad - are at risk of being supplanted by something worse, something perpetual: a climate ‘doom loop’.

While the concept of a ‘doom loop’ has been applied to the durability of climate action in the face of geopolitical tensions, and how crippling sovereign debts in the Global South are derailing climate adaptation efforts, it may also be applicable to English football.

Do not let the melodrama of the concept detract from its tangibility. At every level of the English game, the impacts of climate change are already wreaking havoc. Extreme weather events, such as consecutive storms and heavy rainfall, are battering footballing infrastructures, preventing play and turning fixture schedules on their head. This is as much true for youth and Sunday league fixtures as it is for Premier League games.

These disruptions, which are becoming more frequent and enduring, are creating financial pressures and new forms of risk that clubs and leagues are now having to navigate. In many cases, clubs and leagues lower down the footballing pyramid are already struggling to maintain their pitches and secure enough funding to host games and tournaments. If you throw extreme weather into the mix, it becomes a case of lurching from one disruption to the next. Recovery is made impossible.

Disruptions have a compounding effect. A fixture schedule that is constantly being reimagined and congested puts a huge physical burden on players’ and a financial burden on clubs and fans who are already forking out more and more money for away days. Unplayable pitches can send maintenance costs skyward, pulling scarce resources away from much-needed facilities upgrades or longer term investments. Lower league and grassroots clubs that need the turnstiles to churn consistently to make ends meet are finding themselves at the sharper end of this disruption. If a few key weekend fixtures or cup ties are called off and rescheduled for a weekday kick-off, the lost revenues for clubs can be considerable or, in some cases, even existential.

And while we hear about these disruptions through news stories and anecdotes, we are yet to grasp their aggregate effect on the entire footballing pyramid, the risks posed or the timeframe in which they will play out. When climate scientists speak of the ‘non-linear’ impacts of climate change, it not only describes the increasing unpredictability and severity of impacts like extreme heat, drought and rainfall, it is also about society’s ability to endure them. By their very nature, climate impacts are non-linear because essential infrastructures - transport networks, housing, sewer systems, football pitches - can cope with impacts until, all of a sudden, they cannot. And once this threshold is crossed, the costs for restoring and upgrading infrastructures can be ruinously expensive.

The often cited statistic that one-in-five football clubs will be at high or very high risk from coastal and river flooding by 2050 highlights the brittleness of football’s future, but says nothing of what happens in-between each disaster. Recovery costs are substantial and many clubs will not be able to absorb them. Insurance premiums will increase until specific infrastructures become uninsurable, adding another layer of complexity to the governance and operations of football. To deliver resilience, revamping sport infrastructures must be accompanied by substantial public investment into flood defences and seawall restorations, which are ultimately subject to political cycles and electoral whims. Even if a club manages to keep the water at bay, and remains in the black, it is only a matter of time before the waters return.

The experience of AFC Wimbledon provides a taste of football’s possible future. After the pitch was destroyed due to the River Wandle flooding, fans managed to crowd fund the capital required for the repairs. While this shows the unity of fans in the face of adversity, it is not a scalable or equitable solution. Expecting fans to raise hundreds of thousands to fix football infrastructures, time and time again, will have diminishing returns and sow ill feeling among fans that are feeling the squeeze. In the cases where the water never retreats, centuries of footballing history will have to be uprooted to higher ground. For historic grounds embedded within communities, this is unthinkable.

There is something less tangible that may be triggered if football’s climate doom loop is set in motion: the game losing its hold on us. Grassroots football is already losing an estimated six weeks a season due to flooding and poor draining. If the combustion of fossil fuels persists, disruptions will increase and even the elite level will be unable to insulate itself. If football is played less frequently, the routine and structure it provides so many of us will loosen. Football’s ability to bring people together, to provide anchors within communities, will lessen. The aggregate effect may be that football’s social and cultural power wanes. For those that think football can be a powerful vehicle for building a more resilient and equitable society, this is deeply concerning.

Times of disruption and upheaval can stimulate new ways of thinking, doing and being. Football’s slide into a climate doom loop may ignite more coordinated action between clubs, leagues and government to build climate and community resilience in the face of continued upheaval. It could provide an opportunity to rethink the structure of football, the current capacity of its governance institutions, and a chance to reassess the ways in which it is financed, from the elite level to the grassroots. It remains to be seen whether the current systems in place will be able to bend and accommodate the proliferating demands of climate change or will simply break.

Acknowledging football’s climate doom loop might also provoke us to grapple with the value of football, its role in a warmer and more unstable world, and how it can and will hold communities together. As we reckon with the scale and depth of change required to achieve our climate commitments and maintain a habitable environment, the collective and society-wide shift can often feel abstract and unattainable. Football, and sport more broadly, gives us a language of collective action and change that can help us navigate what is to come.

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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 LinkedIn, Bluesky and X.

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