Football, Society and the Environment, ft. David Goldblatt

What can the beautiful game tell us about the society we live in? How is football and the football industry impacting the environment? In the episode co-host Francesco speaks to David Goldblatt, sociologist of football and author of several influential volumes on the history and politics of the game. David  discusses how football is the greatest modern-day political theatre , and why the game and 'the political' are closely connected. In the second part of the episode, the conversation focuses on David's work on the environment and particularly his involvement with  Football for Future,  the organisation seeking to tackle climate change and its impact on the beautiful game.  

Transcript

Football, Society and the Environment, ft. David Goldblatt

Francesco Belcastro 00:09
Hello and welcome to football, the podcast where football meets politics. I'm Dr. Francesco Belcastro, today exceptionally my co -host, Dr. Guy Burton is now with me. The title of today's episode is Football, Society and the Environment.
Francesco Belcastro 00:21
We're going to be discussing a broad range of topics, from how football is a great political theatre, to what's the role of the beautiful game in society, up to the relationship between football and the environment, so how is football impacting the environment and what football can do to be more environmentally friendly.
Francesco Belcastro 00:37
I'm so glad today to have David Goldblatt with us. Now David is an academic, a writer and historian of football. David, is that a good definition? 
 
 

David Goldblatt 00:48
Yeah, historian, sociologist..
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 00:52
Exactly. David, thank you very much for joining us. I know you've been working a lot recently on climate change and football. Before we get into that, I was wondering whether I could kind of pick your sociologist brain and ask you to tell us a bit about the relationship between football and politics in your work.
David Goldblatt 01:10
Well, the kind of key moment for me was in the early 1990s, when I was taken by a friend of mine to watch Arsenal away at Charlton. And this was the first occasion on which I'd been to a football game with a PhD in sociology under my belt.
David Goldblatt 01:29
And my head exploded as we stood there outside of the stadium watching everybody arrive. I just thought, this is incredible. Structure and agency, tradition, ritual, meaning impregnated geographical space, interesting kind of policing going on, unwritten codes and conventions, collective action during singing.
David Goldblatt 01:58
My sociology brain was just absolutely on fire. And kind of from that moment, I just started thinking and looking at football slightly differently. And it became pretty obvious once I'd made that leap that there was a sociology of football, a geography of football, a politics of football, and economics of football.
David Goldblatt 02:22
And to be honest, I've been kind of unable to take those, if you like, kind of glasses off ever since. That's what I see when I look at football. I mean, with regard to politics, I mean, this is an area, as we know, in which traditionally most football cultures claim that it is or it should be a politics free zone.
David Goldblatt 02:45
And I find this bordering on the hysterical. It's so ridiculous. I mean, once one starts looking at the origins of football and the 19th century sporting culture from which it emerged, in which games playing in general and football in particular was an instrument for nurturing and training the ruling class of the British Empire.
David Goldblatt 03:10
And you think this is not a political agenda? Like seriously, you're the guys who telling us that there's no politics in sport. So I think sport like every other and football like every other social practice is, of course, deeply implicated in systems and structures of power.
David Goldblatt 03:34
I don't find that problematic. I just think it's a much, much more interesting question than to be asking. It's like, okay, what's your politics? If we've got politics here, what kind of politics do we want?
David Goldblatt 03:47
And in many ways, the, you know, no sport, no politics in football, no politics in sport model is an ideological device for stopping that question being asked so that the ruling assumptions of the old order can remain in place.
David Goldblatt 04:04
So I see politics in football at literally every level. I mean, look at the way in which, you know, how does the dressing room work? You know, who has power and authority within that? When we talk about coaches losing the dressing room, you know, it's like, oh, okay, so that's about power.
David Goldblatt 04:26
Or you look at the way in which a club itself is run and the internal hierarchies and divisions, you know, this is politics. If we look at the way in which fans and the management of clubs struggle over the way in which the spectacles should be staged, this is politics.
David Goldblatt 04:45
And then of course, once we actually get to the football institutions, be they the leagues, the broadcasters, the regulatory agencies, FIFA, UEFA, for the Football Association, I mean, like who doesn't think this is politics?
David Goldblatt 05:00
So I think I see it absolutely everywhere in football. And I would say that in the last 20 to 30 years, political institutions, ideologies and movements, which have always had some kind of relationship direct with football, now have colonized it to an extent which is completely inconceivable 30 years ago.
David Goldblatt 05:24
Be it the soft power projects of Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar in football, or the role of the Argentinian government in nationalizing the TV rights of the Argentinian league or the Myanmar junta, calling a Myanmar premier league into existence by pressuring the business elites that depend upon them.
David Goldblatt 05:51
I mean, it's absolutely, everywhere.
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 05:53
Why's that David? Why has it become more important? And is football now too popular for it's own good?

 David Goldblatt 06:01
I would argue certainly in Britain and then we can explore the extent to which this is true elsewhere but I would say in Britain over the last 30 years football which has always been popular and always been symbolic and occasionally metaphorical of wider social concerns has become without question the most popular and most important segment of popular culture and has become I would argue the primary space in which popular storytelling occurs.
David Goldblatt 06:34
I compare in that regard football to soap opera. If you'd have gone back to the 1960s you know soap opera was without question the most important popular cultural space for popular story. Coronation Street was getting 18 to 20 million people.
David Goldblatt 06:51
EastEnders in the mid 1980s for its Christmas edition got 30 million people. The average episode is getting 10 to 15. Tabloids, gossip columns, etc are completely suffused with the stories and the narratives of soap opera.
David Goldblatt 07:08
Prime ministers in this country every single one from Harold Wilson onwards who declared Coronation Street was his favourite program and invited the cast for drinks before the general election of 1966 has recognised that one of the working or lower middle class life spaces on show.
David Goldblatt 07:31
Basically that was the soaps and of course you know this had all sorts of ramifications for storytelling about other elements of British social life. I would say that football has displaced the soaps both in its dramatic structure and its popularity.
David Goldblatt 07:50
I would argue that football is actually primarily consumed as a soap opera. People make me laugh like people say oh it's all about the football and it's like dudes look at the way in which every single game and story is framed.
David Goldblatt 08:05
You know each week we have a cliffhanger guaranteed jeopardy in the episode that is the match and that only acquires meaning of course as it does in soaps by being connected to longer term sets of characters and narratives which always frame and create the meaning of the game and then we have the outcome and then we're waiting for next week when we do it all over again.
David Goldblatt 08:29
Football like soaps also has a sense of kind of compression. Soap characters have more divorces and more crises than anybody else per unit of time. Well so too football in which everything is accelerated and compressed.
David Goldblatt 08:48
Football storytelling and if you look at the newspapers or listen to the podcasts or just talk to people down the pub it's about love and hate it's about conflict and its resolution it's about antagonisms.
David Goldblatt 09:01
These are the stories that are constantly being told and football not only does all of that but you know with the soaps nobody cares who writes the soaps. No one cares who's up or down in the writer's room, right?
 David Goldblatt 09:16
Nobody cares who's getting the residuals but in football there is a completely insatiable non -stop demand for information about all of those issues you know what's going on in training who owns the club how are they spending money.
David Goldblatt 09:30
I mean if only most of the businesses in this country were scrutinized in the same way that football was we would have a very different economy and then of course the other thing with football which makes it even more powerful as a form of political storytelling than the soaps is that nobody watches the soaps when they're being recorded.
David Goldblatt 09:50
There's no audience football's got an audience that's what makes it and the audience is you know chorus yet commentator judge and jury active participant in generating the meaning of what is going on and that makes it an unbelievable form of political theatre so much more significant than the political theatre that is available you know in the West End or the national theatre.
David Goldblatt 10:17
I mean just take the Euro Euro 2020 England take the knee one part of the crowd booze then another part of the crowd drowns it out with cheering the prime minister and the home secretary try and give succor through dog whistle racism to the booers and the players, Gareth Southgate, the FA and the majority of the crowd, refuse to let that happen if that is not the most extraordinary open public theatre of Britain's divisions on the questions raised by the Black Lives Matter movement I simply don't know what else is I mean that is extraordinary you know we're talking like 30 million people are watching this... 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 11:01
It's incomparable in terms of audience, isn't it? There's nothing like that. 
 
 

David Goldblatt 11:06
And it's out in the open. I mean, it's the same with issues of racism. For white people, white people never see racism. Right? They don't see it. They don't experience it. But in football, my, when Raheem Sterling is having abuse screamed in his face on the touchline at Stamford Bridge, suddenly there it is.
David Goldblatt 11:26
People absolutely have to look at it. This is public forced theater of the extraordinary kind. Given this, given that football is soap opera, ritual, public theater, space for collective ecstasy, and has now superseded and eclipsed all of the other popular storytelling spaces that are available, no wonder political power has found its way to football.
David Goldblatt 11:57
Be it from above through state run projects or from below through the presence of social movements, increasingly anti -racism, anti -homophobia, feminist positions being taken and argued through football, it's all there.
David Goldblatt 12:17
So it's like, I kind of think, in a funny way, when people say football is not political or like wire, where else would you go? Where else would you go? And then we come back to the question in a way that we began with.
David Goldblatt 12:32
It's like, okay, so what kind of politics do you want? Let's have a real political conversation. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 12:39
Could I perhaps ask you: one point that you mentioned is this idea of sort of individualism in the society of I football provides a sort of form of collective exercise in a sense, is that something that is still true?
Francesco Belcastro 12:51
Is this being undermined somehow or... 
 
 

David Goldblatt 12:53
No, it's
David Goldblatt 12:55
very, very, very powerful. I mean, it continues to be one of the few spaces left in which we believe in collective agency. Even if it's not true, you know, we believe in collective agency, you know, football is nothing without the fans.
David Goldblatt 13:11
Fans can actually shape and change what goes on. And we know from COVID when we played without fans that home advantage, of course, disappeared, which seems to me a very powerful argument for saying that, you know, atmosphere and what fans are doing within the stadium as a collective makes a really significant difference.
David Goldblatt 13:30
I think it also puts us in touch with the past, you know, that collectivity, you know, it's about human contact being there in the crowd. But football, however you consume it, also places you as part of a wider society and a wider sort of history.
David Goldblatt 13:46
I mean, football is always talking about its history and harking back. And to a great extent in Britain, I think that football is a collective and slightly pantomime version of what we imagine to have been the best of industrial working class Britain now long gone, but for which football remains a cipher.
David Goldblatt 14:08
So I think there are lots of levels at which it's recently a lot of folks who write about their own sort of mental illness and how football is a space to escape the self. John Crace's biography on his relationship with Tottenham is very much there.
David Goldblatt 14:27
Nick Hornby makes this kind of argument all the way back to Fever Pitch. And I think there's a lot of, I think there's a lot of that going on in football as well. You know, it's interesting, my kids don't really, they're not really interested in football.
David Goldblatt 14:41
I mean, obviously, because I am and they have other concerns. But they like many folks when it comes to England, that the Euros or the World Cup men and women, they're taking notice. And if we get to the late stages, they're definitely taking notice and they're hanging going to the pub with their mates.
David Goldblatt 14:59
And for the first time, I would say during the 2018 World Cup, when we had an England team that you could feel good about, both of my kids started saying, we, we did this, we did that, we're going to the semifinals.
David Goldblatt 15:16
Similarly, I think it's, you know, football is just extraordinary what it can do. I mean, an in person, I took my partner Sarah is also, she doesn't dislike football, but she's not, she likes a bit of match of the day on a Saturday night to keep up with the soap opera and, you know, and when England are playing.
David Goldblatt 15:37
So we were lucky enough to go to the final of the Euros in 2022. And wow, what an amazing experience that was. And Sarah said to me at the end, she said, you know, I've been and she has, she's been to dozens of football matches with me, but she's never felt like... She's always felt the "I".
David Goldblatt 15:58
But on that occasion, it was totally transformative. She really felt part of the "we". And, you know, that's, that's the power of football. That's the power of those extraordinary emotional spaces that it creates is that people start thinking about "we" rather than "I", and that is no mean achievement.
David Goldblatt 16:20
You know, we live in a society that is so eye orientated, you know, personal consumption, self care, you know, it's like 40 years of relentless ideological and practical neoliberalism and the eradication of so many of the kind of collective identities that we use to possess.
David Goldblatt 16:41
And that football is such an extraordinary repository and increasingly for more and more people. This is a sociological phenomenon. I just find
David Goldblatt 16:52
It's incredible. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 16:53
How is it possible that a boarding school game in Victorian England became so popular around the world? Is it because of the game itself? Is it beautiful? Is it simple? Is it a way like sort of social and political factors?
Francesco Belcastro 17:10
Is it like the success of the British model? How can we make sense of it? 
 
 

David Goldblatt 17:15
There are three things going on. I think the first thing is to remember that although association football is without question the creation of the public schools and a group of elite schoolboys and young men in the 1850s and the 1860s.
David Goldblatt 17:31
That is all over by the 1880s. I mean, it is remarkable that in 1872 the first FA Cup and there are 4 ,000 people at the Oval having picnics from upper class backgrounds. By 1884, 1885, 12 years later, you have got Blackburn Olympic giving the old Etonians a complete stuffing and a working class effectively thousands of supporters on the railways to the FA Cup final completely obliterating that working class, the upper class demographic presence.
David Goldblatt 18:15
In 1888 the league is formed and English football and the culture that was mimicked, examined, copied, censured around the world is without doubt by the late 19th century one of the most significant cultural creations of working class England.
David Goldblatt 18:37
Its language, its demeanour, its values, its character, it is unquestionably a working class institution. That does not mean the upper class is disappear, continues to run the football association, etc.
David Goldblatt 18:53
But the character of the game is transformed out of all recognition and in demographic terms, the upper class element virtually, it is minuscule. In terms of what is appealing, absolutely it is about the game itself, simple, very few rules, intuitively understandable, everybody grasps the offside rule even before they know what offside is.
David Goldblatt 19:19
Cherry picking and goal hanging are banned by children all over the world. It can be played on any surface, it will do tarmac, it will do sand, it will do grass, it will do dirt, it does not need equipment, it does not really need to be refereed until you get depending on how seriously you are playing.
David Goldblatt 19:39
It is a game of flow rather than a game of sequence which makes it so much more exciting to watch and to play. It is a game where the world can be turned upside down. We know that the odds on the favourites in baseball and basketball and American football are always shorter than in soccer because so few chances to determine the game, mistakes can be everything, the margins are so fine.
David Goldblatt 20:07
The possibility that the world can be turned upside down both in terms of sporting jeopardy but also morally and economically is so powerfully rooted in football and that is intensely appealing. There are other reasons, I will not go on but those are some of them.
David Goldblatt 20:24
But of course it came with baggage and it came with the baggage of being the liberal wing of the British Empire and in the late 19th century and early 20th century impossible as it is to imagine today in crusty declining Britain collapsing into the North Sea, Britain is the most technologically advanced culturally sophisticated global hegemon and in the same way that everybody imitated, copied, explored US popular culture in the post -Second World War era.
David Goldblatt 20:57
Everybody is doing that in the 19th century and the early 20th century. If you want to be modern, if you want to be liberal, if you want to be civilized, then you play English sports and you play above all you play football.
 David Goldblatt 21:10
That is precisely if you read the reports from Bilbao in the early 20th century, that is the tone of the newspaper reports. I think timing is important. If America had become global hegemon earlier, we might all be playing a lot more baseball and basketball but by the time those games are being spread and globalizing themselves, football has already arrived and it's very hard to displace. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 21:41
That's fascinating and I would really really encourage listeners who want to learn more about this too. Perhaps a good starting point is The Ball is Round: A Global History of Football, would probably be of all of your fantastic books, the one I would recommend to people who are just starting to read about this because it gives you the whole story and then obviously people can take it from there.
Francesco Belcastro 22:04
Okay, well I was wondering whether we could talk a bit about the issue of climate change because I know you've been working on that quite a lot recently and if I remember correctly you are the chairman of the Football for Future NGO, aren't you? 
 
 

David Goldblatt 22:16
I'm no
David Goldblatt 22:17
longer the chairman but I am a policy advisor to them and I continue to write and campaign and speak on the subject. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 22:25
Apologies for that, obviously. I know it's not up to date. Why? What does the Football for Future NGO do? And how is it connected to climate change? And what is the connection between football and climate change more generally? 
 
 

David Goldblatt 22:37
Let's start with the first question. I mean, like everything else in this world, football has a carbon footprint and football like everything else on this planet is facing some really serious risks and dangers from climate change.
David Goldblatt 22:51
So let's take the risks first of all, it's getting hotter. It's going to be a lot hotter and a lot of places a lot more of the time. Once you get above 35 degrees centigrade playing outside starts becoming physiologically hazardous.
David Goldblatt 23:04
If you add humidity and bulb temperatures in, then there are going to be in the next 30 or 40 years, very significant parts of the planet where you simply cannot play football safely during the day. That is a massive, massive impact.
David Goldblatt 23:19
We're already beginning to see international sporting events disrupted by heatwaves, cancellation of triathlons, cancellation of marathons, horse racing, golf tournaments. The Australian Tennis Open has come very close to being banned and actually has only been allowed to carry on by endangering actually spectators and participants.
David Goldblatt 23:42
So that's number one. Number two is more rain, more extreme weather is coming alongside that. Grassroots pitches in England are already losing two months of the year to too much rain. How much more will they be facing?
David Goldblatt 23:57
We're losing games to extreme weather, even in professional football where the drainage situation is much better. During storm Eunice in 2021, five or six grassroot stadiums, like at Tadcaster Albion were flooded and ruined, which becomes expensive.
David Goldblatt 24:18
Carlisle United, who were actually in the league, had their stadium flooded in 2015. And I estimate looking at very basic research that anyone can do online, that one quarter of English football stadiums, professional stadiums by 2050 will either be underwater or be facing annual risk of very serious flooding.
David Goldblatt 24:40
I mean, Grimsby Town and Scunthorpe should seriously consider water polo as the future because I don't see unless there is a massive investment in sea defences that they are going to be able to continue.
David Goldblatt 24:52
And the same goes for St Mary's and then the Thames Barrier not looking too clever either. And Chelsea, Fulham and West Ham are all on floodplains. And Fulham has already been flooded. Its shop was flooded actually last year during a bad bout of rain.
David Goldblatt 25:10
So you've got all of that, all of those risks, you know, just in Britain, there will be more around the world, you know, typhoons, hurricanes, you know, damaged stadiums. This is huge. It's going to really, really impact football.
David Goldblatt 25:27
Okay, so what is football's responsibility in this? I mean, nobody really knows. I did a back of the envelope calculation which suggests that the global sports industry as a whole is responsible for around 0 .8 to 1% of global emissions.
David Goldblatt 25:43
And that is not including the sportswear industry. The sportswear industry, I mean, fashion is 10% of emissions is the calculation sportswear is a good couple of percent of that, I would say. I mean, Puma, who've actually done their carbon footprint are producing 14 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, which makes them like Tunisia.
David Goldblatt 26:06
I mean, that's really significant impact. And that's Puma, who are number three. Added as a Nike, whose protestations about their environmental credentials become increasingly threadbare, given that they have yet to actually say what their carbon footprint is.
David Goldblatt 26:21
But I would say it is very, very, very significant. You know, in terms of football itself, probably about 0.5% of that 1% is down to football. And of that 0.5%, the majority is fan transport. I mean, it's us going to see the game.
David Goldblatt 26:39
That is the issue. But that is nonetheless a really significant contribution. Obviously, there are, you know, energy materials, building stadiums, flying players around food and drink, you know, as with anything, but it's us that is the that is the real issue.
David Goldblatt 26:56
So my point, I suppose, at the end of that is to say football, like every institution on this planet has a responsibility and a need given the risks that it face to do everything that it can to contribute to carbon zero behaviour.
David Goldblatt 27:10
What is interesting about football, in particular, is that it is a space in which you might be able to mobilize levels of support for climate action that have not here the two been seen, partly because the demographic that is following football is not necessarily climate warriors, because it gives an opportunity to mainstream what is often turned as part of the culture wars into a kind of dividing wedge issue, and just to make it mainstream, so that that argument disintegrates and to reach, you know, football does hope football does last minute turn arounds.
 David Goldblatt 27:50
You know, we live in a world in which political hope, and the idea of radical political change is at a very, very low end for all sorts of reasons that we can discuss football remains a rare space in which for most people the idea of popular collective action and optimism continue to be powerful parts of the culture.
David Goldblatt 28:13
If those could be mobilized by the football industry and by the climate movement, I think you have something you can make a really, really serious intervention in the debate, as well as if you can actually start leveraging that power to get Nike, and the rest of the sportswear industry and a whole bunch of other industries that are essentially parasitic on football to make the necessary changes, then you've really got something.
David Goldblatt 28:40
And there is, you know, at the leading edge, good things are happening. You know, the UN sport for climate action framework created at COP in 2018 is the organizing sort of space for sport and climate action, committing its signatories to 50% carbon reduction by 2030 and zero carbon by 2040, as well as exorting them to mobilize their sponsors, stakeholders, fans, athletes to pursue climate change.
David Goldblatt 29:11
Football is probably the sport that has responded most strongly to this, though it is not the only one. There have been important interventions from athletics, from golf, and tennis. But you know, football is king.
David Goldblatt 29:25
I mean, in the end, bless all the other sports, nobody cares. You know, they're like serious minority pursuits. Football is the football is king here. And, you know, the Premier League has signed up.
David Goldblatt 29:37
The Bundesliga signed up. We have five Premier League teams. We, of course, have the vanguard in England, which is Forest Green Rovers. But you have really great environmental programs that, you know, Vermont Green in the United States, Real Betis are real leaders in Spain.
David Goldblatt 29:55
So good things are happening. You know, there are interesting things happening. Football for Future is an organisation that is trying to support and accelerate and widen that process as far as possible by working with players, working with clubs, working especially in youth education, but also campaigning on specific issues at COP and other forums.
David Goldblatt 30:17
We have some way to go, though. I mean, that's the thing, you know, the best is best, but we have a huge amount of football organisations that are just not doing anything at all. And this is always a problem.
David Goldblatt 30:30
We have the leaders, but we have a vast lot of laggards. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 30:35
We still have a lot of work to do there, yes?
 
 

David Goldblatt 30:37
Huge amounts of work. I mean, you know, five Premier League teams. Where are the other, you know, 80-odd football teams?
David Goldblatt 30:45
Where are they? You know, just for once. Where is Puma? Where is Adidas? Where is Nike? Where are most of the football teams in Europe? You know, where is anybody? I mean, the other thing with UNSCAF is that the vast majority of participants are from Northern Europe or North America or Japan.
David Goldblatt 31:04
It's like, and who is actually going to get impacted most by climate change? Latin America, Africa, Coastal Asia, none of whom are present in, you know, that that voice is not being heard. Financial transfer mechanisms, which, of course, you have in the wider climate change debate as a necessary part of reaching carbon zero, like, where are we with that?
David Goldblatt 31:27
And then football, you know, football is kind of a bit like mainstream politics, I would say, certainly in England, where the leading edge of the mainstream has reached the point where they've gone, OK, this is serious shit.
David Goldblatt 31:41
We have to do something about that. And we have, you know, lots and lots of policy programs and declarations. And, you know, Eric Dyer's growing vegetables and Jordan Henderson is advertising corn and South... you know, Arsenal have got lots of soda panels on their roof, all good.
David Goldblatt 31:59
However, however, you know, football is not asking the really difficult questions yet. As indeed no one is. Number one, fan transport. I mean, football is, you know, football's here is it can't do it by itself, of course.
David Goldblatt 32:15
You know, it's locked in as everybody is into an insane carbon intensive, unsustainable transport infrastructure and pricing system. And until that changes, you know, you can put more bike racks at White Hart Lane, but it's not fundamentally going to change the problem.
David Goldblatt 32:33
So football needs to become like all sports, a really serious advocate for public transport. And I would say, you know, interestingly, Formula One in the Netherlands basically said you can't come by car.
David Goldblatt 32:45
No one can come to this, which is kind of paradoxical as it's Formula One. But nonetheless, it's interesting, you know, and the Bundesliga has gone a long way down this route by saying all Bundesliga tickets are now free public transport, both locally and regionally.
David Goldblatt 32:59
And we need to get to that like immediately. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 33:02
Yes. 
 
 

David Goldblatt 33:03
And we're not getting there. Football also continues, you know, to accept fossil fuel sponsorship is, you know, at best coy about its own carbon footprint using private jets, which I think is an absolute disaster and is absolutely stop.
David Goldblatt 33:20
And, you know, what happens when the mainstream says this is serious, but doesn't react with actually the urgency and vigor that is required is that the climate movement then becomes more desperate and more radical.
David Goldblatt 33:33
And we've seen that in English football, where Just Stop Oil began their campaigns of disruption by invading the pitch at six different Premier League games. And as we know, I think it was Everton-Arsenal actually managed to lock themselves onto the post.
David Goldblatt 33:46
So that's Britain, you know, that's where climate politics are at the moment, I would say. And in that regard, you know, once again, football is, you know, aside from anything else, it's just an unbelievable political theater for this.
David Goldblatt 33:59
Where else can you see with such clarity in such popular open spaces, these kinds of dilemmas of climate politics? I mean, I'm sort of grateful to football in that regard for providing that sort of plan for us forward. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 34:15
That's a great way to conclude it, exactly where we started from. I'm conscious of time. I just want to thank you for this fantastic conversation. Thank you very much for your time, David. 
 
 

David Goldblatt 34:26
It's my pleasure.
David Goldblatt 34:28
Thank you for having me. 
 
 

Francesco Belcastro 34:29
Well, thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I did. One final reminder, please, if you like the episode, share it, rate it, review it on all the main app where you get your podcast from.
Francesco Belcastro 34:40
And if you want to get in touch with suggestions in terms of guests, episodes, what we should be doing, what we shouldn't be doing. We are on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Blue Sky, on all of the main social media.
Francesco Belcastro 34:52
We would really like to get some more feedback from listeners. And next week, we got an excellent episode. It's Christina Philippou from Portsmouth University on football and money, on the finance of football, maybe.
Francesco Belcastro 35:06
And I think we're going to get Guy, my co -host, back as well. So next week on Monday, as usual, please do check us out. Thank you very much. Bye.