The impact of climate change on football has frequently been in the news in recent years. The relationship between the beautiful game and the environment is however complex and multi-faceted as explained by today's guest, Dr Leslie Mabon. Leslie, a lecturer in environmental systems at the Open University, explains to co-hosts Guy and Francesco how the impact of climate change on football is more pervasive than it is often discussed, but also highlights how the football world and fans in particular are mobilising to promote a more sustainable and environmental friendly. Leslie also explains how the impact of climate change affects clubs and players playing at higher and lower levels in different ways, as well as its specific effects on the women's game.
The impact of climate change on football has frequently been in the news in recent years. The relationship between the beautiful game and the environment is however complex and multi-faceted as explained by today's guest, Dr Leslie Mabon. Leslie, a lecturer in environmental systems at the Open University, explains to co-hosts Guy and Francesco how the impact of climate change on football is more pervasive than it is often discussed, but also highlights how the football world and fans in particular are mobilising to promote a more sustainable and environmental friendly. Leslie also explains how the impact of climate change affects clubs and players playing at higher and lower levels in different ways, as well as its specific effects on the women's game.
How is climate change affecting football? ft. Leslie Mabon
Guy Burton 00:15
Hello and welcome to a new episode of the FootPol Podcast where football meets politics. I'm one of your co -hosts, Guy Burton, and I'm also joined by my other co -host, Francesco Belcastro. How are you doing, Francesco?
Francesco Belcastro 00:25
I'm alright Guy, how are you?
Guy Burton 00:27
Yeah, not bad today, doing well, doing well. Do you know what we're talking about today?
Francesco Belcastro 00:31
We're talking about a very important topic. These last couple of days we've been working hard and we've been working on some very very important topics and this is arguably one of the most important ones football and the environment.
Guy Burton 00:44
Yeah, and it's about football and the environment, and it's also one that was actually recommended to us by a listener a couple of months ago as well, including the guest himself. So thank you so much for that, and it just demonstrates how important it is that we have listeners who actually get back to us with ideas for subjects and topics and even people that we should speak to.
Guy Burton 01:03
So you're quite right. So we're talking about football and the environment and climate change particularly. And to join us, we've actually been joined by Leslie Mabon. So Leslie, welcome to the show.
Guy Burton 01:12
It's great to have you with us.
Leslie Mabon 01:14
Great to be here. Thanks very much for reaching out. Looking forward to talking with you.
Guy Burton 01:17
So, for listeners to know a little bit about Leslie, so Leslie is a lecturer in environmental systems in the School of Engineering and Innovation at the Open University. He holds a PhD in geography and is motivated by what he sees as the big question, whose knowledge counts and why within environmental management and policy.
Guy Burton 01:34
He's written a number of different scholarly papers and chapters on climate change adaptation, risk and just transitions, and last year he published "Football and Climate Change: What Do We Know and What is Needed for an Evidence -Informed Response."
Guy Burton 01:47
That was for the Climate Policy Journal and it's so far been consulted more than 8 ,500 times and as Leslie has told me, was one of the most read papers on the journal at some point. So, just demonstrate how important this subject is.
Guy Burton 02:02
But before we start, Leslie, one of the things that we always like to ask people is, who's your football team and how are they doing?
Leslie Mabon 02:12
So my football team is Raith Rovers, we are in the Scottish Championship and for 2023 -2024 we had a very good season indeed. We finished second in the league behind Dundee United which was a little bit disappointing not to win it but it would have been a mammoth achievement if we'd pulled it off.
Leslie Mabon 02:33
So we had a great season, one of the best seasons in my lifetime and the way we played is something I think we can be very proud of.
Guy Burton 02:40
Yeah, but you're saying but from but the journey feel for you to get to the Raith Rovers ground is quite quite a trek, isn't it?
Leslie Mabon 02:48
That's right. So I live in Oban on the west of Scotland and thanks to the wonders of Scottish geography, otherwise known as mountains, I have to go in a big U shape to get to Stark's Park from my house.
Leslie Mabon 03:00
So home games are, if I'm going by train, it'll be a seven hour journey. Away games, if they're on the west of Scotland, it can be a day trip, it can be 10, 11 hours out the house, but it's just a nice day.
Leslie Mabon 03:12
And one thing, I mean, we maybe come back to this later when we chat. I could drive, very occasionally I do drive to games, but given what I do for my research, I try and make a point of going by public transport as and when I can to and from games.
Guy Burton 03:26
But you're also saying that the game that's popular in the west of Scotland isn't really football either.
Leslie Mabon 03:32
That's right. So the thing around where I live, so I live in Oban and there are some community clubs, but I think our nearest league club as the Crow Flies is probably Dumbarton. And the reason for this is that in Oban, as in a lot of the north and west of Scotland, is we play shinty.
Leslie Mabon 03:49
So shinty, you look up on YouTube, it is essentially hockey without rules, similar in many respects to Irish hurling. And that's one of the reasons why we don't have a huge football team in Oban. It's one of the reasons why for many years Fort William were the butt of jokes in the Island League because all the excellent young athletes go and play shinty rather than football.
Leslie Mabon 04:14
Apart from, of course, Bob McIntyre, the excellent Ryder Cup winning goal for who is from Oban, probably our greatest athlete.
Guy Burton 04:22
Yeah, I probably use that stick as well to begin with. But listen, let's talk about the thing that we actually got you to come in and talk about, football and the environment. So I want to set the stage for listeners.
Guy Burton 04:32
And one of the things that I found struggling thinking about football and the environment is there's so many different ways of exploring this issue. And that's why I think your article was pretty useful for me.
Guy Burton 04:44
And so could you tell us a little bit about what the relationship between sport and more specifically football is with the environment? And how can we best frame it?
Leslie Mabon 04:52
In terms of how we think about how football relates to the environment and climate, traditionally a lot of the story has been around the two sides of the same coin, one being that football impacts on the environment through the emissions that it takes to move people about and run stadiums and maintain pitches, and also that football is impacted by the environment and climate through, for example, extreme weather, rainfall, heatwaves and all the rest.
Leslie Mabon 05:23
That's the narrative that you very often see. There is another way we can think about this though, and this is, I have to say, I alone can't take credit for this. It's a friend and collaborator, Andy Carmichael, who works at the University of Central Lancashire, who put the seed in my head and got me thinking a little bit about this.
Leslie Mabon 05:41
So thanks, Andy, for poking me to go a bit further. But that is that we can also think about football as being a sort of focal point where the environment and a whole range of other social and political issues kind of cross over and intersect and then have effects.
Leslie Mabon 05:58
So for example, football is something where we can think about the identity of a community, we can think about issues of gender, race and ethnicity, we can think about issues of class, poverty, inclusion, exclusion.
Leslie Mabon 06:13
All of these things are things that will affect the extent to which people, places are affected by climate change. So it's well kind of understood that there's no such thing as a natural disaster. Who's affected most by climate change?
Leslie Mabon 06:29
Who causes it most? All of these are, these are a result of social political decisions and social and cultural processes. So football is actually a very useful focal point for seeing how these kind of things play out, for seeing how the way in which a changing environment, a changing climate affects different people differently.
Leslie Mabon 06:49
Football is a place where we can focus on that and then start to see what that means. So this is why when we wrote this review and I wrote this review, I talked a lot about climate impacts, but I also then went on to look at a couple of other areas, one being about fan movements and behaviour change, another being about football and identity and environment and indeed natural resources.
Leslie Mabon 07:18
So the way I would see the relationship between football and the environment to kind of summarise a very long and quite rambling answer is yes, there is this this this sense in which football impacts upon the climate, football is impacted by the climate, but football is also, as I say, this focal point for looking at how climate change intersects with a whole range of social and political issues.
Francesco Belcastro 07:41
That's really, really fascinating. First of all, I want to encourage listeners to go back to the episode we had with David Goldblatt a few months ago, because it complements very, very well what you're saying.
Francesco Belcastro 07:51
And then I wanted to ask you, what it's what does this look like in more concrete terms in England, Scotland, in the UK, more, more, more in general? Can you bring some examples? I mean, you refer to what ideas of class and geography, that's very important.
Francesco Belcastro 08:05
But what does it look like?
Leslie Mabon 08:08
If we think about what it means to think about issues of, for example, class poverty and exclusion in the context of football, what we have seen over the last couple of years in certainly Scottish football, but also I guess across the UK as well, is football clubs have been real focal points for looking at how you might solve some of these examples.
Leslie Mabon 08:36
So we had after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we had energy prices going through the roof, and clearly that causes a lot of problems. Stenhousemuir Football Club in Scotland set up warm spaces. So in their stadium, in their community, they set up spaces where anybody could come to get some warmth.
Leslie Mabon 09:00
The club becomes a kind of focal point then for helping to think about a solution to a problem that is geopolitical and also related to environment and fossil fuels. Similarly, not on my only club Raith Rovers, but also Dundee United, lots of other clubs in Scotland have done food bank collections.
Leslie Mabon 09:18
So again, you might not immediately think of food banks as being directly related to climate change, but nonetheless, it feeds into this bigger picture of a cost of living crisis, which has driven not just by politics, but also by food prices, which in a number of ways do ultimately relate to a change in climate and resource scarcity, and also how some people will try to capitalise on that.
Leslie Mabon 09:43
So there's a lot of these actions which might not appear to be directly related to climate change, but are part of this whole issue of how it is that different sections of society will be impacted differently by a changing climate.
Guy Burton 09:59
But what's interesting to me, though, is that, I mean, as you say, it's indirect, but it must be very difficult to actually be able to quantify some of this stuff, you know, sort of the the both the cause and the and the response to it.
Guy Burton 10:11
I mean, you know, you work in this field. I mean, how do you do it?
Leslie Mabon 10:15
That's absolutely right. And something I always say, and it's a very big kind of health warning to put on a lot of what I've just said, a big caveat, is that quite rightly a lot of clubs won't ever think about branding these actions as climate actions.
Leslie Mabon 10:31
They're social justice actions. They're things that they do as part of their position and role as clubs in the community. And I think this is one of the reasons, maybe why, when we talk about the relationship between football and climate change, we tend to talk a lot about emissions.
Leslie Mabon 10:49
I think because it's quite, I don't want to say easy because that's not a fair characterisation of a lot of the very good work that goes on, but it can be done very clearly. You can look at the distance that teams travel, you can look at the distance spectators travel, you can look at the energy consumption of a stadium, and you can quite easily quantify that, measure it and put a number on it.
Leslie Mabon 11:11
It's much harder to put a number on how many people are in poverty in a postcode district and how much of that is because of climate change. As I say, that's why a lot of these ideas around intersectionality are so important.
Leslie Mabon 11:29
A lot of these ideas around how climate change exacerbates, intensifies and multiplies existing issues is so important. It's very hard to directly measure that, but all of these are actions that do feed into creating, I guess, more equitable, just and resilient neighbourhoods and communities that are going to be able to respond to the challenges that climate change is going to bring.
Guy Burton 11:54
So the thing I'm, what you've just said there, you've talked about equity, equality, justice, but one of the things that I think about, you've talked about different people being affected by climate change, but is it the case that the impact of climate change and how we respond to it is going to be the same for everyone, for all communities, for all countries or will some be more affected than others?
Leslie Mabon 12:22
And it's absolutely the case that the impacts are going to be different between countries and actually even between regions within countries. So let's talk about within countries first, and then I'll come on to the global scale.
Leslie Mabon 12:35
So within countries, we've seen up and down in the UK already that smaller clubs, community clubs are bearing the brunt of climate change in terms of impact. So we've seen teams posting on social media about having a huge number of fixtures postponed, canceled because of flooding.
Leslie Mabon 12:58
And it's very much the case that these much smaller clubs, the community clubs that are also the ones that are really important for building the sense of community that helps to deal with climate challenges, these are the clubs that are actually being hit hardest.
Leslie Mabon 13:13
And that is due to a number of reasons. It's maybe not having the finances to be able to invest in some of the technologies. It's maybe not actually owning their grounds if you're using a council sports pitch or whatever, you can't necessarily look after it and maintain it as well as you might hope.
Leslie Mabon 13:31
So it's absolutely the case that it's the community clubs, smaller clubs are being hit harder. And that's true for the energy and emissions side as well as it is for the weather extremes. So we had, again, at the height of this sort of energy price crisis, Greenock Morton in Scotland to come out and said their energy bills were going through the roof to the extent that that was actually going to have a significant impact on their playing budget.
Leslie Mabon 13:57
So it's a much bigger issue for the smaller teams who maybe don't have the ground staff, we don't own the facilities, we don't have the cash reserves to write these things out. On a global scale, it's absolutely true as well as it is for a lot of climate change issues that the places that are going to be hit first and hardest are going to be the lower latitude, lower income nations that have often done the least to cause climate change in the first instance.
Leslie Mabon 14:27
I think when we look back at 2024, one of the most stark and iconic images we're going to see is the aerial shots of the flooded stadiums in the south of Brazil. So we've had several weeks of football, the Brazilian season has been postponed, the clubs have come together and said we need to stop playing because this is such a huge issue.
Leslie Mabon 14:53
And that is, those are our weather extremes that are very clearly linked to climate change. So already weather extremes are changing, climate is having a direct impact on top level sport in the Global South.
Francesco Belcastro 15:08
We often hear that the football industry has got a massive impact on the environment, but from the point of view of sort of the kind of the most obvious thing, you know, fans traveling and all that, but also merchandise and jerseys and all that stuff.
Francesco Belcastro 15:21
So I'm a football fan in England, in Scotland, in a European country. How easy is for me to be, is there is there a system that allows me, are there ways that allow me to be so environmentally friendly and go to football without feeling bad about myself, or is it very difficult at the moment?
Leslie Mabon 15:42
Something I always think about when I'm talking about football and climate change is trying to not blame fans for supporting their team. Whenever I'm doing anything publicly, even in my own research, something I think is really important is that you don't end up lecturing and blaming people for supporting their team.
Leslie Mabon 16:02
That said, it is true that travelling places, going places does have an impact on the environment and if you fly to matches, it's always going to be the case that that is going to be a significant portion of your carbon footprint and you can't sugarcoat that.
Leslie Mabon 16:21
Nonetheless, as I say, I never want to blame supporters for supporting their team. I think I'd like to look at the bigger picture. If, for example, Raith Rovers qualify for Europe, and we did 25 years ago, we will never do again but you never know, then yeah, if we're drawn away to a Bulgarian team, I'm probably going to be on the plane of the first leg.
Leslie Mabon 16:43
If we're closer to home, I'm going to be on the train. If it's further away, am I going to miss that one game because of the emissions? It would be a very tough ask. If the league is setting their playing schedule up so that they are having league games in New York, in Riyadh, in Melbourne, and they're then encouraging fans to fly around the world and sort of inducing that demand, I think that's very different.
Leslie Mabon 17:10
I would say that the same goes for shirts for replica jerseys as well. I collect shirts. I have a lot of them. I'm getting a lot of trouble from my wife for them but I do have.
Francesco Belcastro 17:21
Same here.
Leslie Mabon 17:22
You know, but clubs don't need to release three or four different shirts in a season.
Leslie Mabon 17:27
There's a difference, I think, between giving fans an opportunity to support their team versus clubs and leagues and football associations actively doing things that are encouraging and inducing us to consume more.
Leslie Mabon 17:42
So the way I would always respond to that question, as I say, is that yet there are some impacts that you can't sugarcoat them, you can't ignore them, but at the same time, I think let's not blame people for supporting their teams, but let's look at the same time at what the clubs and the leagues and the associations are doing to induce us to consume more.
Francesco Belcastro 18:03
And at an institutional level, you'd say we're still quite far from consciousness, from FIFA, UEFA and the organization regarding the environment?That Would that be one of the main problems that you see?
Leslie Mabon 18:12
That absolutely is. At all the sort of association levels, the push seems to be for more and more and more football. And if you maybe remember about 10 -15 years ago there was the the sketch show on TV the Mitchell and Webb look where they had this this sort of mock Sky Sports advert and it said David Mitchell walking along going football, football, watch the football. And this completely and ironically has turned into exactly what FIFA and UEFA seem to actually want to do, is just have games constantly everywhere, all the time, everywhere in the world. And it's not good for for anybody. And I remember a couple of seasons ago Jurgen Klopp saying this as well he said you know it's like boxing you couldn't have a Joshua fight every night. You just couldn't have- it's not good for players it's not good for fans, and yet this is the the model that we seem to want to be going down. The emissions impacts of that are huge. The impacts of well -being for players are huge, and I don't think it's good for fans either to just have so much happening everywhere all the time. So yeah, absolutely it's commercially driven for sure but it's not environmentally or socially or I would say economically sustainable.
Guy Burton 19:25
Yeah, and that's actually something I wanted to ask because it sounds to me that, and I think you referenced this in your paper, you know, may have a higher impact in terms of mitigating climate change, while others have a lower impact.
Guy Burton 19:36
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about, you know, why that is. I mean, what you've alluded to there, I think, is it because, you know, that really the big change is going to come from the associations, from the organizations. I mean, but can we also talk about what fans themselves can do?
Guy Burton 19:55
I mean, ultimately, what are going to be the biggest changes that are going to affect climate change mitigation and adaptation?
Leslie Mabon 20:05
This is one where there's at least two ways you can look at it and just to go back to maybe something I said earlier, you can look at it in sort of cold, hard terms of emissions. So if you're a fan and you want to support football in a, I guess, a more low carbon and environmentally sustainable way, thinking about how you travel to games, thinking about your diet and what you eat and thinking about what you buy in terms of shirts is all stuff that you can do.
Leslie Mabon 20:36
And as I say, particularly air travel is going to be the biggest one just because it is such a big emitter. Again, at the same time, though, individual actions, individual behaviours and big things that FIFA decide are not completely unrelated.
Leslie Mabon 20:52
And we sometimes talk about things like a lack of political will, but that is made up of the actions and the beliefs of all the society. And you can't ignore the fact that there are people that have a lot of power and that there are sponsors that have a very big say.
Leslie Mabon 21:10
But ultimately, if you don't have fans that are willing to buy into a product, then it's not going to run. And this has maybe gone a little bit off topic of climate change, but it's a good example. So my own team, Raith Rovers, and we unfortunately had an incident a couple of seasons ago where our manager and board against what the fans had said, went out and signed a player who had a civil conviction, a civil decision that he had been ruled in a court to be a rapist.
Leslie Mabon 21:42
It was not a criminal conviction, but it was a civil court decision that he was ruled to be a rapist. Fans got together and stopped coming to games. Fans returned their season tickets, returned their scarves, the volunteers that kept the club running pulled out.
Leslie Mabon 21:58
And within a matter of days, the board had had to walk back their decision and release a statement saying that this player would not be selected for the club ever. So that has got nothing to do with climate change.
Leslie Mabon 22:11
But what it does show is that it is possible when fans come together to raise the bar to a status where the club has to take a decision that is going to make them less competitive on the pitch and is going to cost them money.
Leslie Mabon 22:26
This player could have, you know, he could have scored 20, 30 goals for us. He could have got us promotion. The fans raised the bar and said, this is not something that we want. The question that I'm kind of grappling with my head now is when does that happen for an environmental issue or for climate change?
Leslie Mabon 22:42
You know, when does it, when do we come to a point when the fans of a team say, you know, we do not want a glamour friendly in Melbourne or New York or Tokyo or Seoul or whatever, because it's so destructive to the environment and that we will not back the club to do this.
Leslie Mabon 23:05
That I think is, I think we're potentially a little bit further away from that than we are from some of the other, the other social issues that I've seen fans mobilize for. But again, you know, things, things can and do change.
Leslie Mabon 23:18
Five, 10 years ago, you maybe wouldn't have seen such a strong backlash among a supporter base to a player who'd been ruled to be a rapist being signed, but things change. So this can happen for football too.
Leslie Mabon 23:33
And that's, as I say, I think that is maybe one of the areas where I see fans being able to make the biggest contribution. Just to come back to your question is part of it is that your actual emissions and your behaviours, but part of it is what you do as a fan body to put pressure, I guess, on clubs and authorities to not do things that are really harmful to the environment, but things that aren't actually good, not just for the environment, but for society as a whole.
Francesco Belcastro 24:01
We have seen some clubs, probably Forest Green is the clear example there, that have been used as a sort of almost an archetype of an environmental friendly football club. I think they've been relegated this year, probably not great symbolically!
Francesco Belcastro 24:20
But are there similar examples from a sort of organized funds point of view? Are there groups of funds that are organizing around the environment? Things that listeners should check out if they want to read a bit more?
Francesco Belcastro 24:35
Because you mentioned that funds are so important, so I was wondering whether there is anything there?
Leslie Mabon 24:39
There's a huge number of organisations across the UK that are engaging with football and the environment and I guess society more widely. Football for Future, very high profile. I know you had David Goldblatt on in the past, who's very closely associated with Football for Future.
Leslie Mabon 24:53
We've got Pledgeball as well. Pledgeball will work very much with fans and thinking about how fans can come together to take action. They're probably two of the biggest ones. We also have Fair Game. So, Fair Game are, I guess, traditionally have been maybe more associated with a whole range of other social issues that you might think of around football, but recently have started to engage with sustainability as well as part of what we want to see in football.
Leslie Mabon 25:22
So, there's a whole lot of associations that are out there that deal explicitly with climate change, environment, sustainability and football. What I would maybe say for anybody listening, yeah, absolutely get involved with these groups as well as doing that, put a bit of pressure on your own club, talk to your own club, your own support, your own club supporters association and say, look, what are we doing about this?
Leslie Mabon 25:52
And as I said before, it's not all about vegan pies and cycling to games, although that stuff is great, but it's about saying, well, what are you doing to cut out fossil fuel sponsorship? What are you doing to divest from environmentally harmful investments?
Leslie Mabon 26:14
What are you doing to put pressure on the league to think about some of the transport schedules and things like that? So, I would say absolutely engage with climate specific fan groups, engage as well with your own club and ask them what they can be doing.
Guy Burton 26:27
If I may, Leslie, can I come back a little bit to this discussion that we had earlier about sort of the lack of uniformity and some clubs being more, or clubs and communities being more affected than others.
Guy Burton 26:37
What we haven't spoken about yet is gender, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about women's football and the extent to which it's different from men's football in terms of responding to and adapting to climate change.
Leslie Mabon 26:48
Women's football is something that has been, I think, very much understudied in a lot of the scholarly literature on climate change and football, and indeed sport in general to date. I mean, there's a lot of acknowledgement of them.
Leslie Mabon 27:01
I'm not just saying no, everyone's ignored this. There's a lot of acknowledgement out there, not just in my own work, but across the whole field that there needs to be more on women's football and women's sport in general.
Leslie Mabon 27:12
But suppose some of the issues are, and I don't want to kind of go down a sort of environmental determinism or gender versus sex route here, but there are physical, biological differences. We're seeing this whole discussion about the number of cruciate ligament injuries in women's football.
Leslie Mabon 27:31
There's a lot of thought and research that's going into understanding why that is. So a logical extension of that is, again, looking at scheduling, looking at how the stresses and impacts that female footballers might face might be different to those that men face.
Leslie Mabon 27:52
And so as I say, a logical extension of that is to think, well, if we're talking about changes in whether it's heat or whether it's changes in climate, changes in scheduling, what does that mean for female athletes, and are we making assumptions based on what male athletes do?
Leslie Mabon 28:09
In addition, however, there is also the financing aspect and the infrastructure aspect. So things are changing very quickly. But by and large, women's football tends to be played at smaller stadiums, not always, but it tends to be.
Leslie Mabon 28:26
Again, when we think about adapting to climate impacts, the budget and resourcing to deal with those perhaps isn't as great as it would be for some of the mains games and the funding that's available for transport, for training and for conditioning perhaps isn't as big as it is for some of the mains teams as well.
Leslie Mabon 28:48
So there's that side of things, too, that it's the capacity to respond in a women's game might be less than it is in the mains games. So there's a whole range of avenues there. And again, without wanting to go too far down the kind of biological difference, because it is a bit outside my spatialisation, something I just kind of popped into my head is about psychological differences in how different people respond to the stresses and impacts.
Leslie Mabon 29:21
And something that struck me a couple of years ago was that the Scotland women's coach, Shelly Kerr, and she's coached in her career, she's coached men's teams, she's coached women's teams and she was speaking about the difference in how you deal with selecting a team and that with a women's team, sometimes you take one player out and it has a knock -on effect on several players in the team, which she claimed wasn't the case for the men's game.
Leslie Mabon 29:45
I'm not saying I agree with that or not, but I'm just saying it's something to bear in mind is how different genders respond differently, for example, to dealing with postponements, dealing with games being cancelled at short notice, dealing with some of these scheduling changes that you might see.
Leslie Mabon 30:02
So there's a whole range of avenues out there that I think need very careful and considered thought. And the last thing just to be absolutely clear on is that I think as a white man, I'm probably not the best person to do that research.
Leslie Mabon 30:16
And I think there's a lot to be said for ensuring that the people that have the right lived experience, the right knowledge, get the access to the funding and resources to bring that experience into that research.
Francesco Belcastro 30:27
Thanks for mentioning that. It's very interesting because we had two episodes on women's football. One with Shirin Ahmed on the media and one with Carrie Dunn. And both outlined that while the growth of the explosion of women's football, although it's a positive thing, it kind of carries some problems.
Francesco Belcastro 30:42
So based on what you're saying, perhaps it's, you know, it's going to be a bit more resilient, but at the same time, we'll present some of the problems that we mentioned regarding women's football, men's football.
Francesco Belcastro 30:52
More people going to the stadium also means a bigger impact.
Guy Burton 30:56
Yeah, just the last question I wanted to ask as well is that, obviously, you mentioned that on the women's side of football, there's not been as much research and the need for more. Are there any other areas that have been overlooked when it comes to football and the environment?
Leslie Mabon 31:12
Something I'm getting really interested in, not just from football, but from my research more widely, is the links between sense of place, our identity, football and high emitting industries. And what does it mean for your identity, for your club, for the thing you're really proud of to be so closely linked to something that is killing the environment?
Leslie Mabon 31:36
And what sort of set me off about this was that so Borussia Dortmund a couple of years ago had their black out kit and it was called Kohle und Stahl and it was all black. And it was about referring to the coal mining and steel making history of the Dortmund region, of the ruler of that area of Germany.
Leslie Mabon 31:56
And you think that's really fascinating that you're very, very proud of being in an area that has produced a product that has caused a lot of harm to society. Just as an aside, one of my favorite shirts I have in my collection is a Japanese one from JEF United in Chiba from Japan.
Leslie Mabon 32:18
And it was a special one they produced and they had the Sodegaura oil refinery printed right across the front of the shirt. They've got an actual image of the oil refinery printed on the shirt. So, and you've also, you've got teams as well and Wolfsburg being one, even Bayer Leverkusen being another one although they make pharmaceuticals rather than high emitting products Nagoya Grampus Eight in Japan, Toyota.
Leslie Mabon 32:46
You've got a lot of factory teams, company teams that become real symbols of pride that are also associated as I say with really destructive industries. And something I'd like to think about a bit more is how you can maybe tap into that to energize I guess a climate change response in these localities more widely.
Leslie Mabon 33:04
Can you use the identity of the football team and its links to industry to say, look, you know, this is something we're really proud of because this is an area where in the past we were able to innovate, we were able to work hard, we were able to solve problems, we were able to build things that built our economy.
Leslie Mabon 33:22
Can we, let's do that again with something else. Can you use the link between, I guess, football identity and the past to just shine a light on what we need to leave behind? What are the things we need to bring with us and what is it that we need to change?
Leslie Mabon 33:39
So that's something I'd really like to look a lot more at as I say, what it means, how a football team can be a beacon of identity for places where the economy and society has been really closely linked to high emitting industry.
Francesco Belcastro 33:52
You definitely have to come back then to talk to us about this.
Leslie Mabon 33:54
I would absolutely love to.
Francesco Belcastro 33:55
Leslie, thank you very much for your time.
Leslie Mabon 33:57
Thank you very much. I've really enjoyed chatting with you.
Guy Burton 33:59
Yeah, no, no, that was really, that was really useful. So thank you, Leslie, for taking the time to talk to us.
Francesco Belcastro 34:05
Yeah, and I feel like now I can be a way more responsible football fan!
Guy Burton 34:10
Now, we need to think about what's going, what's next, Francesco. So what do we have to say to the listeners about the...
Francesco Belcastro 34:17
Well, I mean, the usual things. Leslie's episode was excellent and we just got it we got in touch with Leslie because someone suggested his work, so people keep- need to keep getting in touch with us and telling us who the cool people doing cool research- and not only research, but the activists, the football clubs that we should be talking to, and and we will keep contacting them. So we need people's help and feedback. They also need to tell us what we're doing well, what we're not doing well and all the important stuff. And they can contact us in different ways can't they?
Guy Burton 34:52
Yup, we're available on or we have web presence on X Twitter, LinkedIn, or rather I do. We have an Instagram account we have a Facebook account. You can reach us in all those different places. And also can we really ask listeners to... if they liked what they heard or if they didn't like what they heard to leave a review. That always helps us. And also to, you know, share the episode with people that they that might be interested in this particular topic. Well anyway, it's been great talking to you again this week so i'll speak to you again then next week, okay? Bye.
Francesco Belcastro 35:23
Take care. Bye. Bye.