Here’s a transcript of the fantastic conversation our COO, Matthew Paver, had with our guests.

Matt: I had the pleasure of attending many Olympic events this Summer. I was in Paris for 10 days and had an epiphany as I was there. I’m from Texas in America where football, American football, is quite big, but it was not something that I ever felt personally I had that much attachment to and sustainability in sport has been something that Carbon Responsible has focused on for a while, and with that, I’ve gotten to know the industry more than I would have in the past. In particular at the Olympics this summer, it dawned on me that sport is integral to the way that we create community as society, and even more so, it’s an indispensable part of how we do that in a sort of post-COVID modern, digital world.  

So with that, the first question I really have for the group is each of you has a distinct role in that sport journey, and your pathway towards sustainability and sport.  How would you tangibly define the impact in the work that you do?   

Emily: Impact is both untangible and tangible. Tangible impact is obviously driving towards net zero society making sure that you’re making operational changes to decarbonise your business. But it’s also the impact that you have outside of that; the way that you interact with your fans and your different stakeholders…that’s impactful. As Mike (CEO, Global Sustainable Sport) mentioned in his slides, there are billions of sports fans. Cricket is the second most watched sport in the world. The impact that you can have by getting those individuals on board with the societal changes we need to reach Net Zero is absolutely paramount to reaching the net zero society.   

Elliot: We work with grassroots sports organistions, but we also work with Elite Clubs, Teams, players- working holistically, with different types of stakeholders across the football ecosystem. Impact is the most important word, perhaps, in our industry. It’s what you live and breathe for as a nonprofit organisation (like Football for Future). I think tapping onto Emily’s point – you can look at operational impacts, and then, social impact. And within operational you’re looking more at carbon, you’re looking at maybe plastic reduction, your impact on nature, for example, or various other greenhouse gasses and pollutants. And then, from a social perspective: it’s looking at awareness. It’s looking at behaviour. It’s looking at attitudes as well, which people don’t often think about. There’s a lot of campaigns about sustainability, which is all about trying to raise awareness. But awareness is one thing. Attitudes is incredibly important as well. These two phenomena lie at an interesting intersect. And working in football as well as a football fan, we do want to drive sustainable impact, but we also want to make football better.

Football can be so much better in so many ways, whether we’re talking about financial sustainability, whether we’re talking about gender equity, whether we’re talking about racial justice or fan experience, there’s so many ways that can be better and also from a player welfare perspective, and we can, once again, draw these big venn diagrams and look at initiatives that are driving sustainable impact that we want to strategize, to be able to fit in with our strategies, our clubs or our businesses, but also intelligently being able to drive these initiatives, which also make football better in other ways, depending on whatever our other departmental strategies might be and what our vision of a better future of football might look like. 

Alexei: For me, impact is a very broad term, and when we talk about something like sustainability, I feel like impact is the most important thing, and it is the end goal of what we’re looking for. Because in this topic of sustainability, as I’m sure we all know, we’ve been to loads of chats. We’ve had loads of conversations about it, where a lot gets talked about you – see it all the time. You have the organisation saying we’re going to do this, or you have government bodies, events like COP26 where they implement plans and discuss strategies that should be rolled out. But the most important thing is action. With sustainability, we have to take action, and that’s how we’re going to be able to measure the impact. So I think real impact for me in football and sustainability, the two things linked together, I split it into a couple of things: 

• First of all, being able to impact the people around us. Football has such a large audience around the world with anything, so many people watching football, so many people participating in it, and it influences people massively. So I think if we can influence people through sports, in this case, football, and influence them in terms of taking sustainable action. That’s how we’re going to have worldwide change to really be able to address the issues that we’re facing in today’s day and age, in terms of climate change, in terms of places not being so sustainable, and really, really be able to change behaviors on a daily basis through individuals and through organisations. So I think that’s one way driving the social impact that we have on fans, on people and on daily actions 

• Second is the impact from football clubs and organisations in terms of what are their operations like? Are they using less carbon? Are they being more eco-friendly, more sustainable in in their actions? How much have they helped local communities? Are there certain things that we can look at and be like, right? Last year, our carbon output was this? That’s impactful, because you’re being able to look at it tangibly, rather than just being able to talk about it and say, right, we’re going to do this. We’re going to do that. We’re actually taking real action. And I think that’s the most important step, being able to take real action and influence the people around us –  that’s where huge change in sustainability is going to happen.  

Dominic: I agree with Alexei. For me, it’s all about action. Impact is action. There’s a quote that says an ounce of action is worth a ton of theory. And that really resonates with me. That doesn’t mean that measurement is important and science associated tool that isn’t important, but actually, but to demystify and to clear the way for organisations to be able to make their reductions and reduce their impacts is so important and sports unique in that that it has an emotional connection to people that no other industry has. It brings people together, of course, creeds, religions, you know, every different aspect. So for me, sport is in a unique position to be able to have that action. Doesn’t mean it has to be perfect! It’s in the public eye, which concerns the sector, but  it’s about having impact through collaboration. I think that’s a really important partnership. I’m obviously going to say that, because that’s my prerequisite. But no one silver bullet is going to do this, and sports can’t do it alone. 

Emily: Yes. So I don’t know if anyone here is a cricket fan in the room or a member of a cricket club, but we have 20,000 members at Surrey County Cricket Club. And getting 20,000 people on board with one directive is impossible. You cannot do it; so we’re not going to try. There are the people who are already bought into sustainability. Great, we keep them on board. But there are the people in the middle. There are the people at the end who believe it’s all woke nonsense and don’t want anything to do with it, that’s fine. You’re probably never going to convince them. But those people in the middle who aren’t sure…they’re the people that you want to engage. And we engage them with a gentle nudge.

Sport is escapism. It’s joy. It is a moment to bring together family and friends in a fantastic bubble. If you scream at that bubble that ‘we’re all going to die because climate crisis is going to kill us all’, no one’s going to come to sport anymore. It completely ruins the idea of what sport is. You have to approach it in a way which brings value to their day. So some of the ways that we’ve engaged our fans is by explaining the changes we’ve made, making their days easier, making the fan experience better with sustainable action, be that through reusable cups, compostable packaging, be that through the way that the players talk player engagement, that’s something that that we get the fans involved in, and you almost use it as a gateway drug.

But for us, the gateway drug of sustainability and sports is the moment someone engages with their club’s sustainability actions. That is when you get them on board. Once you’ve said, oh, you know that thing that you do every time you come to the club, that’s sustainable action, and this is the other sustainable actions we’re taking.  

Alexei: I think engagement comes a lot from understanding, especially when it comes to sustainability, which is such a broad topic, and a lot of us have little knowledge around it. You hear these scientific terms thrown around all the time, all these big numbers – and people don’t always understand. Why should I actually do this? If there’s not going to be something that has any meaning to you and your day-to-day routine or is beneficial to you, I think there’s no point of me doing it. But I feel the younger generation have more of an understanding into what’s actually occurring around the world. They see it on social media. They see it on TV. They’re seeing the firsthand impacts of what climate change is having to these communities. And obviously, for many of us here in quite a developed country, we can’t see the firsthand impact. Can’t feel it directly, like rising sea levels or extreme temperatures, extreme weather, which displaces people from their homes. However, younger generations feel bad for those people. They understand what’s going on, and they think that could be me one day. I don’t want to be in that same situation. I don’t want to be displaced from my home. I don’t want the effects of climate change to be so radical that we can’t come back from it. And I think that’s what drives younger people to have more of an understanding, more of a responsibility. Because I think most people will now understand that if the younger generation don’t do anything about it, nobody else will.

So there’s that responsibility to do something about it. I think that younger people are open to it. They want to make change, and we’re taking steps in the right direction, which is definitely there. But it’s not easy to engage people. It’s never easy, like Emily was saying, it’s very difficult to get everybody to be aligned mentally, even within a football team, like to have 11 players, 20 players aligned on one vision, one tactical vision is not easy. So it’s about doing it slowly, like Emily said, and letting people have an understanding of what’s going on and what the impact is and what the benefits of doing that will be like anything.  

Elliot: Yeah, I think collaboration drives greatest impact, and we’re not going to see the change that needs to happen with organisations and individuals going out and working by themselves, even from a Football Club’s perspective, no matter how influential and how much financial capital it might have. These clubs doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and you do need to see collaboration between clubs and other significant institutions in those towns or cities. We’re seeing an early sustainability strategy at a Premier League club, like Brighton & Hove, who are engaging students at the University of Brighton to develop a basic strategy. Of course, from a partnerships perspective, we do a lot of work with Brentford Football Club, one of the most progressive, new-culture football club in elite football at the moment, making a lot of waves. They’ve recently announced a partnership with TrainLine where they’re going to be offering fans 20% off the cost of a train ticket to their away games.

Once again, like Will mentioned with his travel solution (Staxsy), you’re tackling one of the biggest parts of a club carbon footprint, but you’re also hitting those sweet spots: fan experience, fan affordability, etc. I know that Wycombe Wanderers are working with a local beer provider to cut down the carbon of your pint. So, we’re seeing different scales and levels of the football pyramid here, from the Premier League down to, League One.  So this is this new we can take a scaled approach to when we conceptualise what does this look like? But off the top of my head, there’s a couple of things.  

Dominic: Yeah, there’s a lot of great initiatives out there. Emily’s doing some great work. Stuart at the Oval is doing some fantastic work at Lords, engaging with the audience and looking at travel and transport, which Will mentioned in his talk, is over 80% of their Scope 3, travel. Movement of people is massive in sport; it’s probably the biggest emitter. Silverstone recently did a collaboration with Oxford University and the sports lab there to do a study on the Grand Prix and the half a million cars that go in and out of that event. That’s a huge amount of emissions. And from that study, I understand that they’re committing to exploring reducing their car parking by 50% and increasing their in and out shuttle bus to reduce that impact. Liverpool were doing wonderful things with their red white campaign that goes across both social and sustainability initiatives. The RNA and RSPB collab: RNA have 3000 golf courses so are proactive in their biodiversity, taking data around bird movements and how they can create habitats they encourage birds to nest.  

It’s also about flipping the sustainability narrative from that usual ‘eye-roll’ response we see to sustainability to a nature positive one. I’m positive, and I love nature, so actually, I want to get involved with that, you know? And it should be the same from the C suite perspective. Can you engage with them in terms of, this is an opportunity you cannot afford not to do this, not just because it’s right for the planet, but because it commercially makes sense to. Direct the right language to the right audience – you’ll get the right impact. And you know, as much as the good work that Emily, Stuart does and Lydia does at Edgbaston, they can’t do it on their own, and they need support. I know Emily’s got the support of the board at Oval, but there’s a lot of these sustainability silos on their own, and we’ve got to embed sustainability into organisation’s day-to-day operations, so it just becomes a normal function. It shouldn’t be extraordinary that climate / environmental policies of the organisation are spoken about during an employee induction.  

Solution providers are really important too. Clubs and venues can’t do it on their own. They can’t solve the travel and transport problems. They can’t solve the energy crisis. They can’t solve the waste management without solution providers who do this for a living coming in and departing their expertise. So it’s about a collaborative approach, bringing together all these protagonists, having the Premier League, having the ECB, having the Jockey Club, having all these different sports organisations and the Treasury and the Government all sitting around the same table talking about what action they can take across the ball, rather than it in silos. So for me, it’s it’s in partnerships are so important across the board, but there’s loads of good work going on in sport. It might not grab the headlines, because it doesn’t. It’s not about what’s going on in the field of play, but there’s loads of great stuff that’s going on behind the scenes.  

Dominic:  They’ve got to be all in. It’s so important. It’s got to come from the Federations, the associations, the leagues, the broadcasters. We haven’t spoken about the broadcasters – the purse string holders. The reality is that if they can start putting some of that purse towards environmental issues, as well as safety issues in stadiums.  

That’s why I was so pleased when I heard Sport England has a massive impact, distributing 300 million pounds a year into their next round of funding. Because those three year cycles will have sustainability baked into funding criteria. So if you’re not reaching sustainability criteria, that will impact on your funding. So that will galvanize people’s minds in terms of this is now affecting me, commercially and operationally. So it’s so important for it to come from the from the top. 

And then we’ve not even talked about fixtures. You know, sport just keeps expanding. Emily and I discussed how growth is sort of counterintuitive for sustainability.  European Championships started with 8 teams. Now we’ve got 54. It was great what the Euros did, but they only measured the impact of the finals, not all the qualifying rounds up to that. So the relatives at some stage, you’ve got to say, ‘what’s enough?’ How much commercial gain is there? How much extra enjoyment is it giving to the fans? And how much should we be looking at the end product? Because the bigger sport gets, the end product is going to suffer because we’re already hearing football players admit they’re playing too much. If we’re not providing the best entertainment, I’m going to take my dollar somewhere else, or my pound somewhere else.   

Emily: From a from a strictly personal perspective, the ECB are in a really sticky situation, because there’s a quite big disparity between your first class counties (Lords MCC Middlesex, Edgbaston, Warwickshire) and then there’s Worcestershire County Cricket Club that’s on a flood plain and floods eight times a year. You’ve got to approach these things with a certain pragmatism. And ECB have included sustainability in their county partnerships agreement. But you’re looking at it from two very different lenses: the club that has to clear out all of its ground floor and first floor equipment for the entire off season vs our club (Surrey) that runs an entire conference and events business in the off season. We’re looking at a different set of purse strings. So the ECB, or other sporting governing bodies, can mandate things, but I do think there has to be more sharing of information, and a collaborative approach when it comes to leading with value. So say, using the influence the ECB has on, let’s be fair, some monopolies in cricket, where you’re looking at Dukes and Kookaburra, your cricket content creators, what are they doing to be sustainable, and how are the ECB, the ICC, influencing that? And also, if we’re all facing the same issues as failure, what can our governing bodies do to bring together suppliers to deal with those issues? Sharing best practice and collaboration is where governing bodies can improve, rather than mandate.  

Elliot: The action that’s happening in football at the moment, which people call sustainability and climate action. However, none of the action that we’re seeing at the moment is actually proportionate to the current climate crisis. And if the entire football industry decarbonised tomorrow, that doesn’t actually stop the climate crisis.  

Crucially though, football’s greatest power to address climate crisis, is like nothing else on the planet. Social influence is where it really lies, and we need to see the biggest and most influential individuals and organisations in the world, many of which are in football, be a little bit more fearless when it comes to using their platform to talk about the realities of climate change and be a little bit more creative with their storytelling around it as well.  

So many big brands still don’t understand sustainability and climate and therefore won’t talk about it until they’re perfect. But we don’t have enough time to wait until all these organisations are perfect and can better communicate meaningful messaging.  

Let’s knock our heads together and get some better climate comms out there. 

Matt:  I couldn’t agree more. I used to spend my day sort of working at conferences around corporate social responsibility, and I’ve seen people talk blue in the face about sustainability, and I’m always an advocate for a little bit more controversy and a little bit less corporate notary. 

Dominic: It’s a difficult scenario, because it’s their short term (a board). You know, boards are in there for a 3 to 5year period, and you start mentioning 2050 – their attention glazes over.  So you must change the narrative in terms of it being an opportunity, and if you can get a commercial win away to begin with, then C-Suite focus is there. If you’ve got someone on board that’s already bought into the mission, then fantastic. If you haven’t, then you know, you have to savour the small wins to then create the bigger picture. When you start talking about implementation plans for 2050… who cares? But the reality is that most people don’t care – so zoom it back into the here and now. There are statistics and facts out there saying that games are being affected. 

• 120,000 grassroots games affected – so people can’t go out and physical activity. 

• the relative 350,000 overs were lost in professional cricket in the last 10 years, because all those then boil that down to money lost from secondary income spend.  

And then that starts suddenly focuses people attention on the business case.  

Emily:  Make that long term goal, short-term. Set really, really ambitious short term, goals and make them public. Make it the current boards problem. Treat the planet and sustainability like you would a partner.  Well, what would you do if your partner was asking you, what value is our partnership?  

You can listen to the event conversation over on Spotify here.