Hot on the heels of climatic Foul Play at the 2022 Qatar World Cup, the selection of hosts for 2030 and 2034 editions shows FIFA continue to kick the principle of financial greed ahead of people and planet
The FIFA World Cup, the world’s most popular sporting event, generates interest like little else. Some 1.5 billion people around the world tuned into the 2022 final in Qatar. That tournament generated FIFA, event organisers and world football’s governing body revenue of $6.3 billion.
However, it came at a huge cost to the climate. Emissions totalled a whopping 3.8 million tonnes for the 64 game competition played between 20 November and 18 December 2022, according to FIFA’s own estimate, which we and other watchdogs found to be massively understated. Even this understated total was greater than the emissions generated by Iceland for the whole of that year.
In the lead up to Qatar 2022, FIFA even had the brass neck to suggest that this mega sporting event would be carbon neutral. We, at Carbon Market Watch, called foul play on that from the start.
In our ‘Poor tackling’ report, we exposed how tournament organisers used dubious calculations to make the event appear to be carbon neutral. They ignored some major sources of emissions, especially from construction, and the credits they intended to use to try offset them were of poor quality, meaning they are unlikely to benefit the climate. Moreover, FIFA should have been reducing rather than offsetting the tournament’s emissions.
This greenwashing clearly shows how ludicrous FIFA’s carbon neutrality claims were – and the Swiss advertising regulator agreed, ordering FIFA to stop describing the World Cup using this term. This was almost as delusional as my belief that Scotland would qualify for that tournament (the Tartan Army would go on to lose a qualification match at home to a heroic display from war-torn Ukraine).
While I have learned my lesson and certainly won’t be making any such optimistic Scottish predictions again, the same unfortunately is not true of FIFA, who are jumping further down a climate-unfriendly rabbit hole with the announcement on 11 December 2024 of the hosts for the 2030 and 2034 World Cups.
“An unfortunate geographic choice”
The 2030 World Cup will be held across not one, not two, but three continents – described by CMW policy expert Benja Faecks as “an unfortunate geographic choice”.
Matches will be spread across Spain, Portugal and Morocco, while three ceremonial ties will be held in Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay to mark the centenary of the first World Cup. More on that later.
The 2034 edition was awarded to Saudi Arabia.
With our experience monitoring the carbon totals for Qatar 2022 and the 2024 Paris Olympics, there is little expectation that a sustainable tournament can be delivered by either World Cup.
Seven stadiums were constructed for the 2022 World Cup, in a land of only three million people. These stadia were accounted for on a ‘use share’ basis, a carbon accounting trick that meant that only a fraction of construction emissions were accounted for by organisers. We estimated that Qatar might emit up to 1.6 million tonnes of CO2 from construction, yet the ex-post report totals only 0.8 million tonnes due to this creative accounting.
The 2034 Saudi World Cup plans on building 11 new stadiums, one of which will be held in Neom, a megaproject city which is still-to-be-built. The environmental impact of this fresh construction will be off the scale.
For the 2022 World Cup, FIFA attributed 56.7% of emissions – the largest share of any emission type – to transport. In absolute terms, this was 2.1 million tonnes of CO2. The emissions from transport at the Qatar world cup were therefore higher than the total carbon footprint of the Olympic Games in Paris held in 2024.
With the 2030 World Cup set to require travel across three continents, the carbon footprint associated with travel could be even higher, at a time when it is crucial to lower emissions to contribute to the Paris Agreement goal of keeping global temperature rises below 1.5°C. Rather than becoming more climate conscious over time, FIFA is seemingly moving the goalposts in the opposite direction.
While a geographic split between host locations takes pressure away from one centralised host city, it can consequently affects emissions from air travel immensely. When dispersing such a mega event geographically, it is vital to minimise this impact through actions such as restricting access for spectators so that local spectators have ticket buying priority. This was an effective ploy by organisers of the Act 1.5 Climate Action Accelerator music festival, and was a top recommendation in our analysis of the 2024 summer Olympics.
Climate and sustainability are not make or break concerns of the World Cup bidding process, despite the sustainability sections included in the bids from candidate hosts. The cart very much goes in front of the horse, with a sustainability strategy for the 2026 games yet to appear, despite an assurance that it would be delivered at the start of 2024, while the 2030 perspective is speculated not to arrive before 2028.
Benja Faecks, who co-authored ‘Going for green’ our assessment of the climate strategy and communication of the 2024 Paris Olympics has raised the alarm.
She said, “FIFA World Cups are a carbon bomb even by the obscene standards of other mega events. Qatar 2022 burned the equivalent of at least 21,000 railcars of coal. Rather than attempting to rectify the damage caused by the 2022 edition, FIFA is taking us on a dangerous path with its selection of hosts for 2030 and 2034 World Cups.”
Cash over climate
Despite its talk of making the World Cups climate friendly, FIFA is clearly following the money, whether it is from wealthy and polluting corporate sponsors or countries with questionable human rights and sustainability credentials.
FIFA’s most prominent corporate partners contribute significant negative impacts on the climate and the environment including Saudi Arabian oil giant Aramco, which proudly boasts production of one in every eight barrels of the world’s oil supply. In October 2024 Aramco was subject to a letter sent to FIFA signed by over 130 professional female players highlighting the company’s major rule in fuelling the climate crisis.
Saudi money is omnipresent in sport, very notably in football. Play the Game, an initiative run by the Danish Institute of Sports Studies, detailed in a report titled “Saudi Arabia’s grip on world sports” a list of 910 Saudi Arabian sponsorships in world sport, and that the Saudi Arabian Football Federation has signed 48 memorandums of understanding with various football federations.
This money talks and both FIFA and Saudi Arabia were very keen on bringing the World Cup to the gulf power as soon as possible as seen by the process that confirmed the tournament will return to the gulf so quickly after Qatar.
Bidding rules dictate that two World Cup cycles must pass before a federation can apply to become hosts. Observers suspect that FIFA paved the way for Saudi Arabia to emerge as the only viable option for 2034 by eliminating standalone bids from Europe, South America and Africa through the contrived design of the cross-continental tournament in 2030, while North America would not qualify because it will host the 2026 edition.
Football journalist Matt Slater described the process as “a ridiculous compromise to guarantee [Saudi Arabia] got 2034,” while Guardian Football Weekly host Max Rushden said, “The process had been, it feels, gamed to ensure Saudi Arabia were the sole bidder.”
The human sacrifice
It is a worrying sign of what’s to come. FIFA and its member states have turned a blind eye during the World Cup hosting process to the blatant offside whistles blown by experts.
While at Carbon Market Watch our expertise is in analysing the environmental impact of this undeniably carbon-intensive mega-event, it is impossible to ignore that World Cups can also come at a brutal cost to humanity.
In Qatar, at least 6,500 migrant workers are estimated to have died on construction sites and for what? A month-long party and multiple ghost stadiums.
Some 21,000 workers are alleged to have died in Saudi Arabia’s pursuit of ‘Saudi Vision 2030’, and the Guardian reports that ‘many migrant workers will die’ in the construction of stadiums, transport networks and hotels for the World Cup.
Human rights activist Lina al-Hathloul has said, “Everyone knows that saying anything that could be seen as not even critical, but just not applauding the authorities, is enough to lead you to being jailed. So it’s very important to hear us, to listen to what we have to say, and to stand in solidarity with Saudi political prisoners and everyone who is a victim of the Saudi authorities.”
There are 10 years to go until the Saudi World Cup and it is our moral obligation to hold FIFA accountable for its human rights and environmental obligations. We must continue to expose and challenge the beautiful game’s ugly underbelly. The world’s footballing pleasure must not come at the cost of people and planet.
