The long-awaited Football Governance Bill proposes to reform England’s football landscape by creating a new Independent Football Regulator. Despite the increasing impacts of extreme weather – such as rising insurance costs, flood damage leading to match cancellations and lost ticket sales – the Bill has no mention of football’s contribution to climate change or the need for adaptation and resilience planning.
The predicament faced by clubs, including the smallest and least able to meet rising insurance costs, demonstrates the importance of better understanding risks of climate change and investment in adaptation measures across the UK.
Insurer Zurich UK has found that 40% of professional football stadiums in England are predicted to be at risk from multiple climate hazards by 2050, and 1 in 5 football grounds will be at high or very high risk from coastal and river flooding by 2050. Other studies have suggested one third of grassroots pitches in England are already losing around six weeks a season due to flooding and inadequate drainage, and the Chair of the FA Debbie Hewitt revealed that “we have something like 120,000 games a season cancelled because the pitches are not playable”.
Peers have proposed a series of amendments to address this, including an environmental duty for the regulator, attaching net zero measures to club licensing conditions, and requiring clubs to report on their environmental and carbon emissions impacts.
So far in Committee Stage of the Bill, although the government accepted Peers’ arguments that "all sports, including football, have an important role to play in this [net zero] transition and that it expected expected authorities in the sport, and across all sports, to be working together to advance environmental sustainability” it has opposed tackling any of these concerns within the legislation.
Ministers objected on the basis it felt that “football has already demonstrated the ability to take action on the environment” without the need for government intervention even as research tells us climate change is projected to exact a painful toll on club finances in the future.
Overall, some Peers felt strongly that a requirement for the regulator and clubs to take environmental sustainability measures into account exceeded the “burden” likely to be imposed on clubs of failing to deal with climate change.
There were, however, some positive signs of the government’s preparedness to engage with these proposals, for instance through an offer to meet with Peers to look at how how “good examples of football clubs already acting on the climate change emergency” could “spread best practice”. The outcome demonstrates the value in raising the importance of football’s impacts on climate and the environment and the challenges it faces due to climate change.
The Football Governance Bill continues to make its way through the Lords with Committee Stage expected to conclude in January.
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