I don’t know if it’s my own perception but since the start of the year, there appears to have been a sudden surge in interest in the attempts to make football more sustainable. In the space of a few days in January, I was asked to speak at the United Nations Football for the Goals Member Convening webinar, the Climate Action – Sport & Physical Activity Sector Response event hosted by Active Together and then the Sport for Climate Action and Nature Academic Symposium at Loughborough University.  These events had real merit and substance in that the majority of participants were decision makers in local, national and international sports bodies.

Read more: Is there a surge in interest to make football a more sustainable sport?

At the latter two events, alongside my colleague Dr Leticia Ozawa-Meida, we were able to share our DMU Net Zero Football Research Project work, focussing on our outputs with Leicester Nirvana. The Highfields-based club allowed Dr Ozawa-Meida access to measure the carbon footprint of the grassroots club – believed to be a United Kingdom first. The results have triggered a lot of interest in both the social and engineering science of the project. Shortly after, the Green Football Weekend took place, which appeared to be more popular than ever. I was asked to write two articles, one for The Conversation and the other for the Football and Climate Change Newsletter – the latter giving me the challenge of writing something more popular than Ivan Liburd’s earlier post on Leicester Nirvana’s pursuits of the Sustainable Development Goals. What can I say… I tried… and I don’t mind losing this one! 

On reflection, both articles would not have happened without the groundswell of interest in greening the sport, including a new sustainability commitment from the Premier League. For what it’s worth I still think the professional game sets a disgraceful example and support for amateur clubs is non-existent, so there is a mountain to climb.  

It is my firm belief that an investment in a national campaign, similar to other powerful sports campaigns like Kick It Out and This Girl Can, which have yielded great success in changing attitudes and mindsets in racism and sexism in sport, focussed purely on Climate Action in football could be a gamechanger. This was my argument to the UK Government’s Environmental Audit Committee last year and has subsequently led me to sitting on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s Sport Sustainability Working Group, where I am seeing a lot of will at a national level to improve the sector across the board.

On a more personal level, linked to my research, I am planning to launch an online repository in April. This is for football clubs around the world to share their work and inspire others towards making grassroots football more sustainable. While I get to talk about Leicester Nirvana a lot – as the UK-based club that inspired my work in this area – I am actually collaborating with a number of other clubs around the world too including Germany (notably Eintracht Peitz and International Berlin), The Gambia (Yakarr Football Academy), Kenya (Global Youth Forum), Republic of Benin, Malaysia, Uganda and more. I visited Eintracht Peitz and International Berlin with Leicester Nirvana in early January (pictured above), the outcome of which I discussed in The Conversation.  Finally, this week I celebrated the first professional club joining the project Seattle Reign – a women’s club who play in US NWS League. So that’s my focus for the coming weeks as well as getting a paper published with Dr Ozawa-Meida on what our research tells us so far.

Any clubs wanting to get involved in this project can email me via mcharlton@dmu.ac.uk