No shortcuts for clubs hoping to start measuring their carbon footprint

UEFA’s new carbon calculator: A briefing

UEFA’s new carbon footprint calculator for football clubs, leagues and national associations was launched yesterday at a prestigious and packed event at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium.

The online tool has been developed in collaboration with a wide range of football stakeholders and seeks to establish a unified approach to measuring carbon emissions. It is based on a football-specific interpretation of the GHG protocol and features a built-in library of emissions factors. 

The intention is to make it easier for clubs of all sizes, as well as leagues and national associations, to translate their activity data, such as fuel burned, energy consumed and distance travelled, into tonnes of carbon.

One of the major challenges with calculating a comprehensive carbon footprint is getting hold of good activity data in the first place. How far exactly do a football club’s players, staff, scouts, guests and fans collectively travel across a season, for example? It was reiterated that this tool was not a ‘magic box’. The tool offers no shortcuts to generating good quality, detailed, complete data to upload to the system. For many clubs, this is likely to cause a barrier to getting started.

Drilling further into the capabilities of the tool, there are a number of challenges associated with this first version. For example:

• Fan travel, widely understood to be the largest contributor of football’s carbon footprint, is not yet included in the tool itself. Until this is resolved, users will either need to find an alternative way of calculating their fan travel emissions, or omit them from their reporting.

• The tool uses emissions factors which are international, and does not provide the option to use emissions factors that may be more accurate, such as those specific to a nation or product.

• The system limits users to only three sites - headquarters, stadium and training ground - meaning that clubs with multiple stadiums or other sites, such as retail stores, will need to either bundle data from multiple facilities into a single site or omit them from their reporting.

• In many categories, there is no option to use financial data as input data. While the intention of this is to encourage higher quality activity data to be used, this can sometimes be restrictively difficult to obtain.

• The guidance does not offer parameters or boundaries between organisations, where indirect emissions overlap. Therefore, any attempts to aggregate emissions across clubs or associations are likely to include double counting.

Overall, it isn’t clear what sort of football organisation will find UEFA’s carbon footprint calculator most helpful.

Clubs who are well advanced in having good quality data organised and prepared for a carbon footprint are likely to already be using carbon factors that are even more relevant to their own activities than those available within the calculator. The guidance states that organisations with advanced processes already in place do not need to change their approach.

On the other hand, clubs with limited data capabilities or those without the resources or systems to capture good quality data may feel unable to make a start with the tool, given that good data is a prerequisite. The tool and guidance does give these users a clear steer on the sort of data they'll need to start gathering, but this amounts to a huge burden of work. Corporate standard data reporting cannot be expected of small football clubs.

Despite these challenges, this project is an essential step forward for football and a clear sign of UEFA's intent to take a leading role in addressing football’s carbon emissions by establishing tools and guidance to help clubs, leagues and associations. 

A standardised approach for football clubs to report their carbon footprint has been much needed, and UEFA’s methodology outlines a detailed and comprehensive approach that clubs are invited to adopt. Without this, carbon reporting across football organisations will remain inconsistent, which makes it difficult to draw comparisons or interpret what is reported. I wrote more about this issue last year.

UEFA were clear that further development of this tool was planned based on the feedback and experiences of users, which is great to hear. Picking up on the points above, I would anticipate that further evolution of the tool may include:

• Incorporating a common calculation approach for fan travel emissions

• Providing the option for users to add their own more accurate emissions factors, if they have them

• Providing the option for users to add more sites, to ensure all club facilities can be reported

• Allowing for use of financial data, so that approximations can be made in the absence of activity data

• Further guidance on boundaries and interactions between clubs, leagues and national associations, to enable data to be shared and also correctly aggregated together to generate a total

I do think it’s likely that by requiring such detailed input data and not offering any shortcuts, UEFA may be creating a barrier to use, particularly for grassroots clubs and smaller organisations with limited resources and processes. This may lead potential users, hoping to take their first steps in measuring their carbon footprint, to feel unable to engage, or only able to calculate a very limited portion of their actual total carbon emissions.

A potential solution would be a much simpler and more accessible tool, through which clubs could generate an estimated carbon footprint based on a short questionnaire. In concept, this could work in a similar way to the WWF Footprint Calculator for individuals. Such a tool would use proxies based on readily available club information such as stadium size, average attendance, number of staff and number of fixtures.

While this approach would only provide a rough approximation, it would at least enable a grassroots football club to easily generate an initial carbon footprint figure which it can communicate and take action to reduce. The alternative is a sense that carbon footprinting is all too difficult.

Thom Rawson
Founder, Sustainable Football

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