FOOTBALL was once a simple and beautiful game.
One sub, no VAR, 3 pm kick offs on a Saturday unless World War III was about to start. And players living in big houses, not several.
The game which was once revered for its breathtaking clear lines is now as muddled as the rest of life in the 21st century as the impacts of our predecessors’ disregard for the things we rely on – clean air, fertile soil, stable climate is becoming evident.
There is no easy way to evaluate the environment or the effects that the biggest sport in the world has upon it. But rest assured it’s quite a lot.
Much like the laws on handball and offside have become over-complex, trying to fix a price on indirect pollution from large scale football matches can seem daunting, even dizzying.
And that’s fine. It is rocket science trying to get your head around the facts and figures of how watching professional sport for pleasure can be harmful to our wonderful world and those things we most care about.
There are more carbon calculators than multi millionaire players in Chelsea’s squad. So many apps and tools offering to do the job of totting up the environmental damage of a Tottenham match. But the tools are only as good as the data selected to go into them.
The World Wildlife Fund has one, as do several of the large energy companies. The Carbon Trust, My Climate too. All from a simple Google search.
The arena of sustainable football is a difficult one to navigate – rather like Manchester City’s sudden demise. Almost inexplicable.
Yet where Pep Guardiola is doing his head in trying to turn his team around, as fans with a conscience, you don’t have to.
Football’s offside law or rule, as it is more commonly known, can be mind-boggling.
Our Football Association devotes an entire page of its official website to Law 11: Offside.
Four chunky paragraphs denoting how a player can be offside and how not to be. With a little extra thrown in on the sanctions and punishments.
Yet most of us who go to football regularly simply know offside as the last attacker being in front of the last defender. After a while, it becomes second nature.
Fans don’t need five cameras and competing coloured lines on our TV screens to tell them what’s what.
It should be the same with what I call ‘the Offset Rule’.
Read about AFC WImbledon’s flood and the power of community.
Offsetting is not the answer to combatting the excess CO2 in our atmosphere.
It’s greenwashing when done instead of stopping new emissions from being released and very rarely works – for one, planting baby trees needs several years to absorb a net positive amount of greenhouse gases.
According to ‘CO2meter.com’ it can take a hardwood tree up to 40 years to take just one ton of carbon dioxide out of the air. Even Wolves may have won another match by then.
First and foremost, we need to stop kicking more carbon into our air, whether that’s through us driving less or eating less meat or clubs investing in viable public transport for their fans.
Then, after that, for anything that really can’t be cut at this moment in time we need to consider where best to put our money to genuinely take CO2 out of our air.
We do need to attract money to projects that truly help to remove carbon from our atmosphere. And I say truly because some are not as effective as we’ve been led to believe and even sold as.
Like the offside law, the offset law can be as tricky or as simple as you like.
Offsetting is like VAR – most think it shouldn’t exist, cumbersome, complicated and riddled with interminable delays.
You need to rename it for a start – it should only be done once everything else it is possible to do at this time has been done. Then, pick your target carefully. Handing over a bit of spare cash to a project claiming they will undo the damage your football trip costs is just kicking the can down the road. It’s a conscience-easing exercise.
