UEFA Launches Carbon Footprint Calculator For Football
This week at Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, European football’s governing body UEFA launched its carbon footprint calculator. At its core the calculator is a tool that simplifies the classification of greenhouse gas protocol categories, and aligns specifically with football operations.
The calculator is accompanied by a user guide, tutorial videos and a full methodology. It has been validated by a third-party verifier. It is the first time a sports governing body has rolled out such a tool at this scale ‘to help anyone involved in football calculate, understand and therefore act on their emissions related to the game.’
National Hockey League and SAP launched NHL Venue Metrics in 2022 to measure and analyze the carbon footprint generated by its 32 clubs. The International Orienteering Federation has a carbon calculator for the CO2 emissions of your car trip and FIA launched an online carbon calculation tool for their own federation as well as for their stakeholders in 2021.
Two common challenges cited by football and sports organizations when it comes to advancing their efforts in environmental sustainability are not knowing where to begin, and lacking the internal resource or expertise to do this work.
The phrase, ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’ is often quoted and the Economist reported there are 300,000 football clubs globally, in 2015. This calculator won’t give them the resource needed to collect and input the data to the tool, or create a reduction strategy for them. However, it will help enable those who are ready to calculate their baseline carbon footprint do so in a more standardised way. It should encourage more clubs to begin this work.
This was highlighted by Thomas Seillé, head of projects and CSR for French Football Association speaking at the launch this week. He commented during a panel discussion that the tool ‘allows organisations to save time and concentrate on data collection and the most important part, to elaborate on an emissions reduction strategy. This is just the beginning of the journey.’
Speakers at the event were asked to share insights on the wider landscape of climate reporting and environmentally-focussed activities in football and sport.
Lindita Xhaferi-Salihu, Sports for Climate Action Lead at UN Climate Change noted that ‘football can step up and do much more’ and that the calculator is an ‘encouraging sign.’
Ariela Caglio, associate professor of management accounting at Bocconi University and senior advisor to UEFA spoke about the new Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive reporting in Europe, and how it will affect not just football clubs that will be subject to disclosure, but many more because of their sponsor’s obligations under CSRD. She highlighted that the carbon calculator anticipates what clubs and organisation’s will need to provide in the coming years in regard to greenhouse gas emissions.
Michael Lloyd, environmental sustainability manager at Arsenal Football Club was asked about collaboration on environmental initiatives between Premier League clubs during the event, he replied ‘We all want to be the best on the pitch, but outside of that we work closely together. We’re picking up pace.’
Matouš Michnevič, vice president and ESG lead for Europe at Mastercard said ‘Sports clubs have to catch up with corporates’ and highlighted the role of incentives for fans, saying ‘if they aren’t living a financially healthy life, they won’t care about sustainability.’
Thom Rawson of Sustainable Football notes in his round up of the calculator launch that there are no shortcuts to generating good quality, detailed, complete data to enter into the tool. There is scope for the tool to evolve in the future, but this launch is a strong indicator of the way football, and by extension sport, is moving towards a more action led, standardised approach to tackling environmental impacts.
