A World Cup On Three Continents Sparks Climate Concerns
Diffusion of football teams and hordes of fans will travel across the world for matches on three continents as a result of the 2030 FIFA World Cup, raising concerns about the impact on the environment.
An announcement on the 2030 and 2034 World Cups will be made on Wednesday, with expectations of a dramatic expansion of geographic footprint — and with that planet-heating greenhouse gas emissions.
While Saudi Arabia is the lone candidate for 2034, Morocco, Spain and Portugal have formed a joint bid for the 2030 tournament, with Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay each also set to host a match.
Guillaume Gouze, of the Centre of Sports Law and Economics at the University of Limoges, said FIFA has a “moral responsibility” to integrate climate concerns into its tournament plans.
Instead, he said, it had proposed World Cups that are an “ecological aberration”.
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‘ Crazy Idea ‘
In general attempts at “sportswashing” in sport are harder than they once were, according to Benja Faecks of the NGO Carbon Market Watch, which evaluates climate promises of major events, with academics and campaigners holding organizations to account.
However, she claimed that the location of the 2030 World Cup was “unfortunate.”
Teams and possibly hundreds of thousands of their devoted fans must travel by air when an event is spread over locations that are located thousands of kilometers apart.
The three matches in Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay are to mark the 100th anniversary of the event, which was born in Montevideo.
According to David Gogishvili, a researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, FIFA is eager to promote access to football in various parts of the world.
However, he continued, “it is a crazy idea in terms of the impact this choice will have on the planet.”
FIFA has already expanded participation in the competition, which will see 48 teams take part in the 2026 edition — held in Mexico, the United States and Canada — compared to 32 in 2022.
This “is almost worse than the Cup on three continents”, says Aurelien Francois, who teaches sports management at the University of Rouen in France.
More teams means more fans wanting to visit the venues, more capacity needed in the hotel and catering sector, and more waste, among other issues.
FIFA states that the tournament will be played in a footprint of neighboring nations with extensive and well-developed transport links and infrastructure, with the exception of the games in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.
Saudi Aramco, an oil and gas conglomerate, also became a major sponsor earlier this year in a contentious agreement that will continue until 2027.
More than 100 female professional footballers from 24 different countries wrote in an open letter in October that the agreement should be canceled because of human rights and environmental concerns.
Fan Zones ,
According to researchers, simply reducing the geographic footprint is insufficient.
While the 2022 World Cup was held in a “compact” site in Qatar, it was necessary to build new air-conditioned stadiums that were rarely reused.
According to Gogishvili, a policy that, in line with a rule from the International Olympic Committee, would prohibit awarding the World Cup to a city where everything has yet to be constructed.
Another way to reduce air travel is to encourage train travel and reserve a large portion of stadium tickets for fans who travel within a few hundred kilometers.
Gouze, like other experts interviewed by AFP, supports creating more fan zones in soccer-loving cities for “a collective experience” that recreates the stadium atmosphere in front of a big screen.
FIFA would need to accept the impact on the World Cup’s economic viability, though.
Soccer supporters reflect the overall population, so a growing proportion of people are more environmentally conscious than they were a few years ago, according to Ronan Evain of Hamburg-based Football Supporters Europe.
He said that while co-hosting is not a problem in and of itself, citing the example of the 2002 Cup co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, the 2030 tournament poses “too many questions” for fans.
Fans who want to follow their teams around the world have financial concerns as well as the environmental costs.
But die-hard supporters will not let the long-haul flight put them off, said Antoine Miche, director of Football Ecologie France.
“Passion can make you do things that don’t make sense”, he added.
Source: Channels TV
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