It’s still not coming home, but sustainable stadiums must be the real winners

As the collective #Euro2024 heartbreak in England heals and the national delirium in Spain recedes, organisers must ensure the #cities hosting the next football championship promote genuine #sustainability.

A football stadium has immense potential to contribute to the sustainability of a city through the three pillars of the economy, society and the environment. The economic angle is easy to cover with ticket sales, hospitality and travel pulling wealth and activity into the area.

The social aspect is also often evident. The jobs created directly and indirectly by the stadium are a boost to the local labour force. But on top of that is the incalculable benefits of the feeling of local solidarity that matches create.

So, it is the environmental side that is harder to see as a positive. The construction of a stadium will create emissions embedded into the structure, waiting to be released at the time of redevelopment, while travel to and from games will add to that. But increasingly stadium owners have seen the potential to make the buildings and the surrounding activity less environmentally harmful and thus more sustainable.

A good place to start is the Berlin Olimpiastadion, where the 14 July Euro 2024 final was held. Just two months before the match its Green Globe Standard 1.7 certificate was renewed for a third time. This assessment of the sustainability performance of companies in the travel and tourism industry recognised the conversion of the roof lighting in favour of energy-saving LED lighting and the construction of a photovoltaic system on the stadium roof.

The stadium company has, appropriately, set itself “goals” of conducting business in an “ecologically, economically and socially sustainable way and using its resources responsibly, sustainably and sparingly”. It aims to minimise the use, and to conserve, resources of water, heat and electricity and has even set up bee hives within the stadium’s grounds.

While fans are unlikely to shun their club and switch allegiance to another because it fails to deliver sustainable outcomes, these benefits will be watched closely by local authorities and investors that have their own targets to hit.

Passing forward

For those reasons, perhaps, there has been a noticeable trend by stadiums in the UK and around the world to both implement — and broadcast — the sustainability gains they have achieved.

One to grab the most headline despite its League Two status is Forest Green Rovers in Nailsworth near Stroud, that is owned by green energy industrialist Dale Vince. It went fully vegan in 2016 and in 2018 became the first club in the world to be certified carbon neutral by the Climate Neutral Now initiative run by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is looking to build a new Eco-Park stadium made almost entirely of wood while more than 80 per cent of its energy will come from on-site solar and wind power.

At the other end of the football hierarchy is the Premiership’s Tottenham Hotspur whose stadium and training centre, that were completed in 2019, are powered by 100% renewable energy. The owners have established an ecological habitat at the training centre by planting hundreds of new and semi-mature trees and tens of thousands of new plants, hedges and flowers.

In the Netherlands, a country famous for its windmills, the Johan Cruijff ArenA, home to Amsterdam’s Ajax football club, is powered by a modern wind turbine north of the city and 4,200 solar panels on the stadium roof. Within the Global South, Brazil’s Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro stands out. It was upgraded ahead of the 2014 FIFA World Cup to include more than 1,500 solar panels on its roof. According to the consultancy CTE that was brought in to advise, it cut the use of drinkable water by 71 per cent by using entirely reused water for its toilets and urinals.

Sustainability game changers

These stadiums are exemplary but given the tens of thousands of similar facilities around the world, it will be essential that all new-build and renovated stadiums include similar guidelines in their construction.

There may be some way to go. Academic research found that while the green certification process had been a “game changer” with venues increasingly seeking such approval, there was still room for them to become public statements about achieving climate goals rather than just “awkward” structures.

In other words, it is not enough just to reduce the negative environmental impacts of their activities — noble as that is. They need to use their facilities and surrounding grounds to make positive contributions to both the environment and the local community. One example would be using the infrastructure as a venue not just for sporting events but, during times when it would otherwise be shut, as a platform for education and community-based initiatives and a hub for regeneration.

Hopefully individual initiatives such as Eco-Park’s wood-based construction, ArenA’s solar panels and Maracanã’s reusable toilet water can become part of a checklist that developers of new environmentally sustainable stadiums need to tick off. As UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed said at 2002’s International Day of Sport for Development and Peace, athletes, managers and clubs can contribute towards tackling climate change.

Tournament organisers can also make their mark, as FIFA may have done at the Qatar 2022 World Cup where it said the estimated 3.6 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions has been entirely offset, a claim rejected by critics as greenwashing.

Football fans globally will now turn their eyes towards the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Canada, Mexico and the United States, the latter often featuring in lists of the most sustainable stadiums. The final almost exactly two years away in the New York New Jersey Stadium must be a trophy for tackling climate change.