Nature of Things - A Salon for the curious mind
football for future
Football and climate change: keeping the beautiful game playable
Football is community, identity, ritual, and emotion at scale. In this Nature of Things salon, Dan Hall from Football for Future explores the two-way relationship between football and the climate crisis, and what “sustainable football” could look like in practice.
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Football, Floodlights and the Future of the Planet, Dan Hall on why climate action belongs in the stands
Football can make a random town square feel like home, turn strangers into kin, and lift a grey Tuesday into myth. It is also, as Dan Hall argues in this Nature of Things salon, one of the most powerful cultural engines we have for shifting attitudes on climate change.
Recorded live as part of Nature of Things, A Salon for Curious Minds from Paddington Development Trust, supported and hosted by Mason and Fifth, this talk is a brisk, human guide to the two-way relationship between football and the climate crisis, and what we can do about it.
Dan is Communications Manager at Football for Future and a sustainability engagement officer at UCL. He is also, crucially, a proper football fan. That authenticity matters, because football audiences can smell a corporate “hello fellow fans” from three stands away.
Why football is a climate conversation waiting to happen
Dan’s opening point is simple and sharp, climate change has a communication problem. If the story is only burning planets and distant doom, many people either switch off or feel powerless. Culture is a better doorway. Stories, music, sport, belonging, identity, the things that live in the body, not just the brain.
Football is uniquely placed here because:
It reaches across class, age, and geography
It creates shared language instantly
It has heroes with real influence, on behaviour, on brands, even on government policy
Dan uses familiar examples of football’s outsized cultural power, from a player moving a sponsor’s bottle at a press conference, to Marcus Rashford shifting the national conversation on free school meals. The point is not celebrity worship. It is proof that footballers and clubs can move public attention faster than most institutions.
The pitch is not a separate planet, how climate change is already disrupting the game
Football is deeply physical. You cannot play on a lake. You cannot sprint safely through furnace heat. You cannot “tactics” your way around lightning.
Dan maps out the ways climate impacts are already showing up across sport:
Flooding and waterlogging that cancels fixtures and wrecks pitches, especially at grassroots level where drainage and repair budgets are thin
Extreme heat that becomes dangerous for high-intensity play
Storms that force cancellations and create safety risks
Air pollution that affects health over time
Sea level rise that threatens infrastructure in low-lying and coastal areas
A key thread here is inequality. At the top level, clubs can often adapt, rebuild, and insure. For non-league clubs, and much of the women’s game, a flooded pitch can mean weeks of lost revenue and a long recovery.
The other direction, how football contributes to climate change
Dan also names the less comfortable truth, football has a footprint.
Across the match-day experience and the wider industry, impacts come from:
Travel (especially fan travel at scale, plus team flights)
Stadium construction and maintenance
Food and drink
Merchandise and kit turnover, often synthetic and replaced season by season
Sponsorship and advertising, including relationships with high-polluting industries
Dan highlights how sponsorship is not just a logo problem, it shapes what is normalised. If the loudest brands around the pitch are selling high-carbon lifestyles, that pulls against the shift we need.
What “sustainable football” can look like, not perfect, but practical
One of the best parts of Dan’s talk is that it stays grounded. This is not a lecture about moral purity. It is a sketch of what good looks like, and how to make it easy.
A few examples he points to:
Tournament organisers designing for low-carbon choices, for example ticket-linked public transport and practical circular systems (like reusable cup deposits)
Clubs acting as community leaders, using their reach to normalise sustainable travel, food choices, and local nature connection
Education embedded into football pathways, from academy programmes to staff training and player learning
Adaptation support for the most vulnerable parts of the game, so grassroots clubs are not left to drown alone
The goal is not to turn football into a seminar. It is to keep the game playable, and use the game’s cultural gravity to pull more people into climate solutions.
Football for Future, what they do
Football for Future sits at the intersection of climate expertise and football culture, working across the ecosystem rather than shouting from outside it. Dan describes work that spans:
Club workshops and operational support
Youth and academy education
A growing community of player “climate champions”
Events and panels that bring football and climate into the same room, without either being watered down
Two flagship pieces of work mentioned are worth exploring after you listen:
Pitches in Peril
A major report produced with Common Goal and climate risk analysts Jupiter Intelligence, using location-specific data to show how climate impacts could reduce playability at key football sites and World Cup venues.
Explore: Pitches in Peril
Fields of Change, via Move for the Planet
Through adidas’ Move for the Planet initiative, Football for Future helped create the Fields of Change handbook, showcasing sport-for-good projects around the world, from rainwater collection and solar to community gardens and recycled-material pitches.
Explore: Fields of Change
How to talk about climate, Dan’s “no lab coat required” approach
Dan’s communications toolkit is useful well beyond football. A few principles that land strongly:
Be authentic. Football audiences spot inauthenticity fast.
Lead with values, not just facts. Values stick.
Move from fear to hope. People act when they feel agency.
Make it relatable. Find shared ground, match day rituals, community pride, the love of the game.
Set clear goals. Who are you talking to, what do you want them to do, and how will you learn?
In other words, climate communication works best when it feels like an invitation, not an exam.
Links and projects mentioned
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