Clearly, the game of football — soccer for Americans — is not one of the big carbon emitters that can help solve the planet’s global warming problem. But everyone must pitch it, and the global football industry says it produces more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, which is about the same as a small country such as Denmark.

Sports in general face similar CO2 problems, with much of their Scope 3 emissions generated by their spectators driving to and from games. For instance, the 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar generated an estimated 3.63 million tonnes of CO2e — which stands for carbon dioxide equivalent and measures other greenhouse gas as well as carbon. More than half of those emissions was from spectator transportation.

And sports will pay for inaction by the global economy. A recent study showed that half of the former winter Olympic host cities will likely be unable to sponsor winter games by 2050 due to a lack of snow and ice and almost one-fourth of England’s football league stadiums (23 out of 92) could be partially or totally flooded annually.

Three areas of focus for football clubs and other sports:

1. Super clubs need to lead on the pitch and off: The major clubs around the world need to create the analytical tools, metrics, and know-how to help themselves and smaller clubs reduce their emissions. Smaller clubs won’t get there by themselves, and those with the deepest pockets need to help everyone in the sport push to the net. Hallowed turf. 
2. A big question for clubs is whether to extend or refurbish existing stadiums or invest in new ones: As Arsenal Football Club’s ESG Director Hannah Mansour said at the Innovation Zero conference, the biggest source of a club’s emissions are fans travelling to matches, so locating stadiums near public transport would go a long way towards reducing matchday emissions.
3. The referee is reaching for the whistle: Especially in Europe, regulations will force clubs to up their game on emissions, and most are not prepared to tackle or even account for the emissions their activities produce.

Meanwhile, the world is watching. Football and other sports teams occupy a unique space in the psyche of the populations they serve, exerting influence that goes way beyond the game itself. That means they will be held to account more keenly because we expect more from our sporting legends than trophies.

In this video, Oliver Wyman partner Tony Simpson, a Birmingham City Football Club supporter, and Barrie Wilkinson, a Liverpool Football Club fan and Oliver Wyman partner, discuss the unique decarbonizing challenges football and other major sports face, what they need to prioritize, and how ready they are.
 

Barrie

Hi, I’m Barrie Wilkinson, and I’m a partner at Oliver Wyman. I’m also the Head of 3D Carbon Accounting, and I’m here today with Tony Simpson, a fellow Partner and football fan, and he is also the Head of Oliver Wyman’s sports business unit.

Tony

Thank you, Barrie, and thanks for the intro.

Barrie

Today we’re going to talk a bit about carbon accounting and some exciting work we’re doing together. We are starting to do some interesting work in this area, but why is it so important for these big football clubs to get their heads around their impact on the environment, the carbon footprint?

Tony

I think there are two or three important aspects to this Barrie. One is from a regulatory perspective, some of the biggest clubs in Europe are going to have to start reporting their carbon footprints and their energy footprints. But more importantly, actually, clubs like yours, Liverpool, and some of the other clubs, all stand for something, they all have a position in the community. They have a responsibility to be able to know what their footprint is and actually try and reduce it for those within their communities and neighborhoods. And I think the third thing is, that football itself and the leagues and federations are some of the biggest and have some of the worst footprints actually if you look at training grounds, how the clubs are using under-soil heating in the winter, how they use fertilizer, some of them look like farms, their training grounds.

Barrie

Yeah, there’s kind of a new generation of consumers, kind of millennials who are much more interested in these topics. And they’re going to demand from some of these big, big brand names.

Tony

We did research early this year on fans and how they valued clubs, and actually, their sustainability had gone from being one out of ten to being one right up to six, seven, now. And that new generation of people, especially with the rise of women’s football, which is purpose-led, it’s about empowerment is really important. So, you can’t have all of that, and you can’t care about millennials and not care about carbon. You can’t care about carbon, not about social equity. It is all linked. I know we did some work recently with modeling on the new Anfield Stadium stand. How do you do that? How does somebody model a stadium?

Barrie

Yeah, it’s complicated. I mean, we’re doing aircraft engines and farms and everything. So, carbon accounting needs to be able to deal with pretty much every activity that exists. The little study we did on the Anfield stadium was on their 7000 seats stadium extension, and yet the way you go about these exercises, you create an inventory. So, in this case, there was some demolition site excavation activities, then there was the construction of all the steel roof trusses, steel beams and concrete aspects. These are the kind of famous ones, steel and concrete. So, the concrete in that the foundations, the steps of the stadium to the car parks, and you get into things like, catering activities, all these things. So, we went through probably three or 400 activities that we mapped out. Now the question is, where is the data coming from? So, in some cases, we're actually able to get hold of the bill of material level information, right? So, a manufacturer might send those. There are actually 8000 components in this aircraft, Boeing 747 or whatever. So you can do it at a very detailed level. But the next part of the exercise is how do you map that to an emissions carbon footprint? So, there are broadly three methods. The suspend-based method where we say, okay, we spent $10,000 on steel, multiply that by a fixed number to get to emissions. The more accurate method is to say, well, what type of steel was it, and do we have an accurate parameter for that particular type of steel or fertilizer or concrete, or whatever the activity is. And then there's a third method, which is the supplier-specific, where we say actually this concrete producer actually has a different footprint than this other concrete producer over here. And they're able to supply us with that information.

Tony

So, you can actually grade by not only what material you've got, but where the source and who the supplier was.

Barrie

And that's exactly what's happening now. So, the procurement departments are saying, I don't want to know just what it costs, now I want to know what the carbon footprint of this product is, and that's going to help them determine which suppliers they go with.

Tony

Knowing club chairmen and CFO’s, as I do, outside, probably the big six, seven in the Premier League. I don't think football is set up to even handle this. Is there an opportunity for clubs or federations to talk to somebody like ourselves and get this information so that they can easily, because it sounds really complicated to say it myself, so they can easily report it?
It is something they're all trying to grapple with, but I don't honestly believe they understand where to start on what reporting looks like. How can we help them with that?

Barrie

I think we need to think about what solutions are appropriate for different industries. So, in the big German manufacturing companies, they are building their own kind of carbon accounting capabilities. We are helping them with the industrialization and the data and stuff. But I think, particularly with mid-sized smaller clubs, they're not going to create a carbon accounting capability inside their club. They don't have the resources. So, we need to create some centralized utilities, and it could be the big clubs leading, what is the model for training facilities for stadiums and fund travel? And often what you see is so there are some nice models like for airports, for example, where all the airports use the same model, they at the input, how many flights are coming in and out the airport, etc., all that kind of stuff. So, you can see a similar template would be very useful for the clubs where they can say, how many fans have I got, how many seats are in the stadium.

Tony

Do you see an opportunity for your team at Oliver Wyman to talk to some of the clubs about providing a service, initially, to show how they can best, where they can, reduce its footprint, and then help them on a journey to full sustainability?

Barrie

These projects, typically start with a baselining of your emissions. So, your current emissions or your projected emissions and the upstream down to all different categories, but you then need to say, well, I'm going to set targets to reduce my emissions, what are the different levers I can pull? And you hit on an interesting topic here. Where typically old-fashioned buildings tend to be less energy efficient. And all of these, as you say, they were designed for petrol cars to come in and out. They might not have electric charging facilities. So there's a question, is it worth me putting in a lot of capital investment now to upgrade my facility so my ongoing running emissions will be lower, or do I somehow try and make the best of what I've got and then focus on a lot of this is going to come down to financing and we do a lot of work with the banks about how can the banks help with the transition by financing some of these changes. Unfortunately, a lot of these things, they don't automatically lead to financial benefits in the short term. You can't tell the difference between green steel and traditional steel. It's the same thing. So how do you start to justify spending more on the green stuff and that's where you really need the regulators to come in. So, it's great actually that with now CSRD, every company is going to have to be fully transparent about their emissions, and there'll be more pressure and more rewards for the companies who are actually taking action.

Tony

We did a survey with our sister company, Lippincott, where we looked at brands in women's football, and we looked at not how they performed but what the consumers thought about those brands in terms of their social commitments. And it was really interesting. Some of the biggest performing brands, like Liverpool, Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Barcelona, were behind brands like Angel City, like Forest Green Rovers, like these brands stand for something that means something, and therefore the loyalty and the value of those brands was sub optimized.

Barrie

So, I think as we see this detailed information coming out, I think the finance function is going to start reining in these, the PR department saying, listen, you can't say that stuff anymore because we're about to publish the actual facts, and we need to make sure they're in alignment. So hopefully, what that will mean is instead of the loudest voices with the best PR people getting all the credit, you'll suddenly start seeing that the companies that are actually taking action, getting more credit.

Tony

How are companies preparing for what is inevitable in terms of their reporting, and how are you seeing that across the board?

Barrie

I'd have to say to date, there hasn't been a lot of positive activity where people are doing things at scale. But the arrival of the regulations in November 2022 has led to a massive uptick in activity. So, in January, we've got, ten or 20 conversations going in every industry about big programs of work kicking off, and those programs of work, all have the same focus. A lot of its Scope 3 reporting focused on real deadlines of 2024 being your first reporting period and working back from the on-set. So, you need to do a lot of data gathering, modeling, prototyping.

Tony

So, the message is, we need to get ready to get reporting. Luckily for me, my team Birmingham aren't going to be in there any time soon. But from a Liverpool perspective, at least we have done a bit of modeling, we're sort of halfway there now. But Barrie, thank you for that. Hugely interesting and insightful.

Barrie

So, Tony, I enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for your insights, and thanks to everybody for listening.

Tony

Thank you.

Learn more about Oliver Wyman's 3D Carbon Accounting service here.

Clearly, the game of football — soccer for Americans — is not one of the big carbon emitters that can help solve the planet’s global warming problem. But everyone must pitch it, and the global football industry says it produces more than 30 million tons of carbon dioxide every year, which is about the same as a small country such as Denmark.

Sports in general face similar CO2 problems, with much of their Scope 3 emissions generated by their spectators driving to and from games. For instance, the 2022 FIFA World Cup Qatar generated an estimated 3.63 million tonnes of CO2e — which stands for carbon dioxide equivalent and measures other greenhouse gas as well as carbon. More than half of those emissions was from spectator transportation.

And sports will pay for inaction by the global economy. A recent study showed that half of the former winter Olympic host cities will likely be unable to sponsor winter games by 2050 due to a lack of snow and ice and almost one-fourth of England’s football league stadiums (23 out of 92) could be partially or totally flooded annually.

Three areas of focus for football clubs and other sports:

1. Super clubs need to lead on the pitch and off: The major clubs around the world need to create the analytical tools, metrics, and know-how to help themselves and smaller clubs reduce their emissions. Smaller clubs won’t get there by themselves, and those with the deepest pockets need to help everyone in the sport push to the net. Hallowed turf. 
2. A big question for clubs is whether to extend or refurbish existing stadiums or invest in new ones: As Arsenal Football Club’s ESG Director Hannah Mansour said at the Innovation Zero conference, the biggest source of a club’s emissions are fans travelling to matches, so locating stadiums near public transport would go a long way towards reducing matchday emissions.
3. The referee is reaching for the whistle: Especially in Europe, regulations will force clubs to up their game on emissions, and most are not prepared to tackle or even account for the emissions their activities produce.

Meanwhile, the world is watching. Football and other sports teams occupy a unique space in the psyche of the populations they serve, exerting influence that goes way beyond the game itself. That means they will be held to account more keenly because we expect more from our sporting legends than trophies.

In this video, Oliver Wyman partner Tony Simpson, a Birmingham City Football Club supporter, and Barrie Wilkinson, a Liverpool Football Club fan and Oliver Wyman partner, discuss the unique decarbonizing challenges football and other major sports face, what they need to prioritize, and how ready they are.
 

Barrie

Hi, I’m Barrie Wilkinson, and I’m a partner at Oliver Wyman. I’m also the Head of 3D Carbon Accounting, and I’m here today with Tony Simpson, a fellow Partner and football fan, and he is also the Head of Oliver Wyman’s sports business unit.

Tony

Thank you, Barrie, and thanks for the intro.

Barrie

Today we’re going to talk a bit about carbon accounting and some exciting work we’re doing together. We are starting to do some interesting work in this area, but why is it so important for these big football clubs to get their heads around their impact on the environment, the carbon footprint?

Tony

I think there are two or three important aspects to this Barrie. One is from a regulatory perspective, some of the biggest clubs in Europe are going to have to start reporting their carbon footprints and their energy footprints. But more importantly, actually, clubs like yours, Liverpool, and some of the other clubs, all stand for something, they all have a position in the community. They have a responsibility to be able to know what their footprint is and actually try and reduce it for those within their communities and neighborhoods. And I think the third thing is, that football itself and the leagues and federations are some of the biggest and have some of the worst footprints actually if you look at training grounds, how the clubs are using under-soil heating in the winter, how they use fertilizer, some of them look like farms, their training grounds.

Barrie

Yeah, there’s kind of a new generation of consumers, kind of millennials who are much more interested in these topics. And they’re going to demand from some of these big, big brand names.

Tony

We did research early this year on fans and how they valued clubs, and actually, their sustainability had gone from being one out of ten to being one right up to six, seven, now. And that new generation of people, especially with the rise of women’s football, which is purpose-led, it’s about empowerment is really important. So, you can’t have all of that, and you can’t care about millennials and not care about carbon. You can’t care about carbon, not about social equity. It is all linked. I know we did some work recently with modeling on the new Anfield Stadium stand. How do you do that? How does somebody model a stadium?

Barrie

Yeah, it’s complicated. I mean, we’re doing aircraft engines and farms and everything. So, carbon accounting needs to be able to deal with pretty much every activity that exists. The little study we did on the Anfield stadium was on their 7000 seats stadium extension, and yet the way you go about these exercises, you create an inventory. So, in this case, there was some demolition site excavation activities, then there was the construction of all the steel roof trusses, steel beams and concrete aspects. These are the kind of famous ones, steel and concrete. So, the concrete in that the foundations, the steps of the stadium to the car parks, and you get into things like, catering activities, all these things. So, we went through probably three or 400 activities that we mapped out. Now the question is, where is the data coming from? So, in some cases, we're actually able to get hold of the bill of material level information, right? So, a manufacturer might send those. There are actually 8000 components in this aircraft, Boeing 747 or whatever. So you can do it at a very detailed level. But the next part of the exercise is how do you map that to an emissions carbon footprint? So, there are broadly three methods. The suspend-based method where we say, okay, we spent $10,000 on steel, multiply that by a fixed number to get to emissions. The more accurate method is to say, well, what type of steel was it, and do we have an accurate parameter for that particular type of steel or fertilizer or concrete, or whatever the activity is. And then there's a third method, which is the supplier-specific, where we say actually this concrete producer actually has a different footprint than this other concrete producer over here. And they're able to supply us with that information.

Tony

So, you can actually grade by not only what material you've got, but where the source and who the supplier was.

Barrie

And that's exactly what's happening now. So, the procurement departments are saying, I don't want to know just what it costs, now I want to know what the carbon footprint of this product is, and that's going to help them determine which suppliers they go with.

Tony

Knowing club chairmen and CFO’s, as I do, outside, probably the big six, seven in the Premier League. I don't think football is set up to even handle this. Is there an opportunity for clubs or federations to talk to somebody like ourselves and get this information so that they can easily, because it sounds really complicated to say it myself, so they can easily report it?
It is something they're all trying to grapple with, but I don't honestly believe they understand where to start on what reporting looks like. How can we help them with that?

Barrie

I think we need to think about what solutions are appropriate for different industries. So, in the big German manufacturing companies, they are building their own kind of carbon accounting capabilities. We are helping them with the industrialization and the data and stuff. But I think, particularly with mid-sized smaller clubs, they're not going to create a carbon accounting capability inside their club. They don't have the resources. So, we need to create some centralized utilities, and it could be the big clubs leading, what is the model for training facilities for stadiums and fund travel? And often what you see is so there are some nice models like for airports, for example, where all the airports use the same model, they at the input, how many flights are coming in and out the airport, etc., all that kind of stuff. So, you can see a similar template would be very useful for the clubs where they can say, how many fans have I got, how many seats are in the stadium.

Tony

Do you see an opportunity for your team at Oliver Wyman to talk to some of the clubs about providing a service, initially, to show how they can best, where they can, reduce its footprint, and then help them on a journey to full sustainability?

Barrie

These projects, typically start with a baselining of your emissions. So, your current emissions or your projected emissions and the upstream down to all different categories, but you then need to say, well, I'm going to set targets to reduce my emissions, what are the different levers I can pull? And you hit on an interesting topic here. Where typically old-fashioned buildings tend to be less energy efficient. And all of these, as you say, they were designed for petrol cars to come in and out. They might not have electric charging facilities. So there's a question, is it worth me putting in a lot of capital investment now to upgrade my facility so my ongoing running emissions will be lower, or do I somehow try and make the best of what I've got and then focus on a lot of this is going to come down to financing and we do a lot of work with the banks about how can the banks help with the transition by financing some of these changes. Unfortunately, a lot of these things, they don't automatically lead to financial benefits in the short term. You can't tell the difference between green steel and traditional steel. It's the same thing. So how do you start to justify spending more on the green stuff and that's where you really need the regulators to come in. So, it's great actually that with now CSRD, every company is going to have to be fully transparent about their emissions, and there'll be more pressure and more rewards for the companies who are actually taking action.

Tony

We did a survey with our sister company, Lippincott, where we looked at brands in women's football, and we looked at not how they performed but what the consumers thought about those brands in terms of their social commitments. And it was really interesting. Some of the biggest performing brands, like Liverpool, Manchester United, Bayern Munich and Barcelona, were behind brands like Angel City, like Forest Green Rovers, like these brands stand for something that means something, and therefore the loyalty and the value of those brands was sub optimized.

Barrie

So, I think as we see this detailed information coming out, I think the finance function is going to start reining in these, the PR department saying, listen, you can't say that stuff anymore because we're about to publish the actual facts, and we need to make sure they're in alignment. So hopefully, what that will mean is instead of the loudest voices with the best PR people getting all the credit, you'll suddenly start seeing that the companies that are actually taking action, getting more credit.

Tony

How are companies preparing for what is inevitable in terms of their reporting, and how are you seeing that across the board?

Barrie

I'd have to say to date, there hasn't been a lot of positive activity where people are doing things at scale. But the arrival of the regulations in November 2022 has led to a massive uptick in activity. So, in January, we've got, ten or 20 conversations going in every industry about big programs of work kicking off, and those programs of work, all have the same focus. A lot of its Scope 3 reporting focused on real deadlines of 2024 being your first reporting period and working back from the on-set. So, you need to do a lot of data gathering, modeling, prototyping.

Tony

So, the message is, we need to get ready to get reporting. Luckily for me, my team Birmingham aren't going to be in there any time soon. But from a Liverpool perspective, at least we have done a bit of modeling, we're sort of halfway there now. But Barrie, thank you for that. Hugely interesting and insightful.

Barrie

So, Tony, I enjoyed our conversation. Thanks for your insights, and thanks to everybody for listening.

Tony

Thank you.

Learn more about Oliver Wyman's 3D Carbon Accounting service here.