Forest Green Rovers: Introducing Sustainability to the World’s Biggest Sport
Forest Green Rovers fc, based in Gloucestershire, UK, are the world’s first vegan football club. Alex discusses the changes that the club have made to be more sustainable, and the effects that they have had on the planet, and sport as a whole.
Forest Green Rovers FC, Image from Jeremy Corbyn, Flickr.
It was my Grandpa, a retired butcher, who introduced me to supporting the world’s first vegan football club. It’s that kind of oxymoronic irony that lies at the heart of Forest Green Rovers’ efforts to introduce an entirely new and alien ethos to a sport and support base subscribed to the shortest of short-termism philosophies, built around forgetting about the troubles of the world for two hours on a Saturday afternoon, all enjoyed alongside the cheapest ‘meat’ (used here in the broadest possible sense of the term) burgers and pies going. One of the core appeals of football, at any level, is this ability to switch off from talking about difficult, depressing questions like deforestation, climate crisis, and what animal do you think this burger is actually made from. Those were questions for the week. This is the weekend, and now nothing matters more than leathering a ball into a net, singing a few songs, and agreeing with your mates in the pub for the 150th week in a row that yes, that was the worst ref you’d ever seen.
And yet, Football isn’t just a bit of Saturday fun, it’s a global multi-billion dollar industry that every oil nation, betting company, airline, and car manufacturer wants a slice of, and the effect on climate is very real. A Rapid Transition Alliance report into the effect of sport on climate found that the 2018 World Cup held in Russia was responsible for 2.16 megatons of carbon emissions, the equivalent to the annual carbon output of Puerto Rico being produced in just a month. A study into the German First Division club Wolfsburg calculated that once all of the club’s activities were taken into account, their annual carbon output was approximately 10,000 tonnes/year. Premier League clubs in England will have even higher carbon outputs, with local fans priced out of regular attendance in favour of tourists, travelling at an incredibly high carbon cost from all over the world to finally watch in person the team they have supported for years through a screen. Until the Coronavirus pandemic put the brakes on, the gravy train at the top levels of the sport was a runaway one, with bigger and bigger sponsorships, richer and shadier owners, all leading to rapid wage and transfer fee inflation. Short term success, be it avoiding relegation or securing lucrative Champions League football, was worth everything. Long term sustainability, both financial and environmental, was barely given lip-service.
Key stats about Forest Green Rovers FC. Sources: FGR Climate Study, List of FGR Seasons, Zaha Hadid Architects
While the elite end of the sport ran away with itself, in a quiet Gloucestershire hamlet at a little club on the hill, the sport was beginning to change. Forest Green Rovers had been in existence for 120 years, almost all of it in total obscurity. In the late ‘90’s, the part-time club suddenly shot up to the Conference - the highest level of Football outside of the official Football League. There the club clung on until 2010, twice relegated and twice reprieved due to other clubs being demoted. Out of money, and surely out of luck, it looked like the only route for Forest Green was back down, until the investment arrived.
Dale Vince is not your typical Football Club chairman. A former new age traveller, Vince set up his renewable energy company in 1995, building his first wind turbine up the lane from Forest Green’s stadium. This company eventually became Ecotricity, and upon hearing of his local club’s financial plight in 2010, Vince used his new-found wealth to invest in, and later take over, Forest Green. Change was coming in every possible way.
Watching this process happen as a fan was bizarre. Traditionally, football fans have a strange relationship with change. Football clubs are the classic old broom with 15 new handles and 12 new brushes, cycling through kits, players, managers, and coaches almost every year, and more rarely changing stadiums, badges, or colours, yet fans will insist it is still the same cultural anchor it always was. When a new owner comes in and makes sweeping changes to the club colours, club badge, and controversially, the menu, some pushback is inevitable. Red meat was taken off the matchday menu for both players and fans in 2011, extended to all meat not long after, and eventually, an all-vegan menu. While not everyone was a convert (my Grandpa still refuses to try the vegan options, something about ‘loyalty to his profession’) food sales increased at an even higher rate than attendances, and compared to the cheap and miserable mystery meat on offer at most clubs, the food at Forest Green stands out as high quality, with effort poured into selling the viability of vegan food. It also filtered through to the players, as some, including the right-back of the playoff winning side Dale Bennett, converted to full veganism, and attributed an improvement in their performances and recovery times to their dietary changes.
Forest Green Rovers FC, Image from Jeremy Corbyn, Flickr.
Image from quisnovus, Flickr.
Impactful changes were also occurring behind the scenes. Solar panels were installed at the club, a water-filtration system to recycle rainwater implemented, and the club even used a solar-powered robot mower for the world’s first organic football pitch. Electronic car charging points were installed at the ground, wildflower meadows were planted, cooking oil from the kitchens recycled into biodiesel, incremental environmental improvements were occurring in every feasible corner of the club.
On field success was sluggish by comparison, but by 2015 the novice owner had learnt some lessons, and the club reached the playoff semi-finals for the first time, before finally achieving promotion to the football league in 2017 after a 3-1 win over Tranmere Rovers at Wembley. Suddenly, a village team was beating the likes of ex-FA Cup winners Coventry City on the pitch while trying to revolutionise the industry off of it, and the club’s stature grew and grew as an established league club, playing in kits made of recycled bamboo and coffee beans. Now, Forest Green are well set to challenge for promotion to League 1, and the club’s ambitions of establishing themselves in the Championship (the 2nd tier of English football and possibly the most competitive league in the world) are edging closer and closer to becoming reality.
Success breeds success, and the club is now planning to move to a new 5000 capacity, carbon neutral, wooden stadium 20 minutes away from the current ground. Again, bringing the fans along with the club on such a big move will be a challenge, but every sign so far suggests that the majority of existing fans are happy with the changes, and new fans are discovering the club all the time. A stadium showcasing the club’s ethos, as well as being in a more accessible location, is the logical next step. Surely the most telling sign of the club’s optimism that the world can turn around our climate crisis is that the proposed site of the new stadium is, under current projections, expected to be underwater by 2050.
The proposed design for the new stadium. Source: Zaha Hadid Architects
One source of that optimism is that where Forest Green have blazed a trail, other clubs are beginning to follow. Spanish 1st Division club Real Betis has committed to becoming carbon neutral, achieved by funding green energy projects in Costa Rica. German clubs such as Freiburg, Mainz, and Werder Bremen are also taking individual action, with schemes ranging from solar panel production, recycling programmes, green waste management, and public transport initiatives aimed at the club’s local areas. Investment programmes in sustainable forestry practices and geothermal energy systems further from home have been pioneered by Hoffenheim and Augsberg respectively. A league-wide carbon neutrality strategy is unfortunately still lacking in Germany, although such a scheme has been agreed in France.
There is an incredibly long way to go for both the Football and Sports industry as a whole. As long as the sport is steeped in money from the fossil fuel industry, progress will likely be slow. But the stronger and more common renewable energy becomes, the weaker the financial grip the likes of Gazprom and Qatar will have over the world of Football, and the faster change will come. In Forest Green Rovers there is now a ‘greenprint’ for bigger clubs and organisations to follow. This club has proven that an off the field drive to change things for the better can marry with on-field success, and that pursuing one need not derail the other, removing excuse after excuse for nervous and reluctant boards at the richest and most impactful clubs in the world. Like the first and smallest domino in the row, Forest Green may have started something that will eventually topple the status quo.
Forest Green can’t convince an old butcher to try a vegan burger, but they might just be able to convince the world’s most popular sport to change its ways.
Alex Johnson
Alex is a Geology BSc graduate from the University of Exeter, and is currently studying for a Masters by Research in Volcanology. His current work involves modelling ground deformation at the Soufrière Hills Volcano in Montserrat, and he has a particular interest in exploring the best ways to communicate science in an accessible manner. In his free time, he watches as much sport as he can get away with and pays more attention to politics than is probably healthy.