Uefa’s lofty environmental ambitions and the elephant in the room
Qatar Airways is the ‘official airline partner of all Uefa men’s national team competitions’. Photograph: Michael Regan/Uefa/Getty Images
Didier Deschamps wasn’t amused. Les Bleus had had to fight hard to see off an excellent Austria side in the evening game and needed to rest. Yet it was well past 3am when the coach ferrying them back from the Düsseldorf Arena finally came to a halt at the entrance of their hotel in Bad Lippspringe. The 180-kilometre trip had taken some three hours, when a 30-40-minute flight from Düsseldorf to Paderborn would have allowed Deschamps’ players to be in their beds considerably earlier. Deschamps kept his thoughts to himself, however. It was not his role to question the commitment made by the French federation to minimise its carbon footprint, in accordance with the principles of “climate action and advocacy” outlined in the “Football Sustainability Strategy” programme which Uefa had unveiled in December 2021.
The same principles have been applied to adapt these Euros’ schedule in order to “maximise sustainability without compromising fairness”, to quote Uefa’s head of men’s national team competitions, Marcelo Alleca. The folly of Euro 2020’s revolving carousel of venues – 11 stadiums in 11 countries, for goodness sake – would never be repeated. A more compact, greener tournament? Yes please, and thank God for that, everyone said, from fans and media to players and environmentalists. Unlike Fifa’s ludicrous – and thoroughly debunked – claim that Qatar 2022 would achieve Net Zero, Euro 2024 would at least be a step in the right direction. Uefa meant business.
But “business”, here, meant two very different things. A closer look at what is happening on the commercial side of Uefa’s affairs suggests that the intent of greening up its flagship tournament, while undoubtedly sincere in some corners of the organisation, is being undermined by the governing body’s continuing dependency on the millions coming from oil-hungry industries; and this, despite Uefa’s having to put an end to its relationship with its greatest polluting sponsor, Gazprom, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (but not, it should be noted, with the Russian oil giant’s CEO Alexander Dyukov, who still sits on Uefa’s executive committee).
A report compiled by Dutch-based activist group Fossil Free Football shows how difficult most of the teams taking part in Euro 2024 find it to wean themselves from oil-tainted money. The roll-call of their official partners, all of whom are using Uefa’s tournament to showcase their brands, include car manufacturers Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen (partner of no fewer than five teams: the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Italy and Germany), fossil energy companies Petrol and ENI, the so-called “fossil fuel financiers” Crédit Agricole, UBS and JP Morgan Chase and eight airlines, the most visible of which is Qatar Airways, the “official airline partner of all Uefa men’s national team competitions”, which announced the renewal of its deal on the very day Euro 2024 started.
How such a partnership can be compatible with Uefa’s lofty environmental ambitions is not immediately obvious, despite Qatar Airways adopting the widely ridiculed (and quickly-abandoned) “Fly Greener” slogan before Euro 2020. When approached by the Guardian to explain how and why an airline could be a suitable sponsor for a sports body seeking to achieve Net Zero by 2030, Uefa responded that it “[did] not exclude such a category (ie airlines) from [their] partnership programme” without providing further detail. “We are aware that the organisation of such a major event gathering football stakeholders and fans from all over the world involves a significant footprint”, was how a Uefa spokesperson put it. “We are therefore determined to be part of the solution to reduce as much as possible our impacts on the environment”. Who gets to define what “as much as possible” signifies in this context is not clear, but it looks like that person is more likely to work for Uefa’s commercial department than for its sustainability team.
Then there is the elephant in the room: Uefa’s expansion of its three men’s club competitions; and just wait for their women’s equivalents to follow the very same path – it is only a question of “when”, not “if” – in the name of “competitive balance” and generating “solid revenues for clubs, leagues and grassroots football across our continent”. The impact an extra 177 international fixtures a season will have on football’s carbon footprint can be measured and, regardless of the mitigating measures which may or may not be put in place, the numbers aren’t pretty. A 2023 BBC study estimated that teams and fans will travel an extra 463 million air miles per year to attend European games as of the 2024-25 season. This translates into an additional 112 thousand tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere, roughly the equivalent of what a town of 10,000 inhabitants produces over 12 months in the UK.
It is at this stage that Uefa’s balancing act looks the least convincing. On one hand, it acknowledges that “ticket holders’ travel constitutes a significant share of overall emissions in sports & entertainment events”. On the other, it doesn’t take these figures into consideration for its own Carbon Footprint Calculator, which, the Guardian was told, “considers fan travel out of scope as it is not under [Uefa’s] operational or financial control”. Despite the prudent progress made in some areas, it is a bit like a fast-food outlet saying it has nothing to do with the greasy litter piling up in front of its door when it’s not providing the bins to dispose of it.
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