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IMPACT
The Cost Of Following Your Team Abroad The environmental costs of away trips for fans in Europe and beyond... With these continental football ties,
This then becomes a question of flying or not going to the match at all
their team through the tournament. The issue with these then becomes more about the numbers traveling a long distance to get to the country in the first place, like with any iteration of the Olympics in recent memory, where there will be significant amounts of travel from all over. Whilst there are ways of offsetting or taking less impactful transport, the trend towards decentralising tournaments or “spreading the game” to areas further away from heartlands is creating situations where there is no good answer for environmentally conscious fans.
Graphic & Page Design by Natasha Phang-Lee
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These alternative options are more possible when it is an international tournament rather than a continental cup competition. For these, it will generally be a case of return flights, with maybe one set of flights to another venue, and local public transport. With the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, for example, whilst you have the major impact of flying there, you can more or less get to all the events using local transport. Even for tournaments that are more spread out, such as the recent Women’s football World Cup in France, once in the country, it was possible for fans to get trains from Paris to Lyon or Marseille in order to follow
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The issue with these then becomes more about the numbers traveling a long distance to get to the country in the first place
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If you were a Liverpool fan wanting to go to your side’s away ties in this year’s Champions League group stages, your plane journeys would have emitted 548kg of CO2 according to Guardian calculations, and that is excluding your travel to and from London as well as to and from some of the destinations. This is just for three relatively close matches in Salzburg, Naples and Genk and not for the travel further afield such as last year’s Europa League final in Baku or the buildup over 4 knockout rounds. When you have the sort of numbers traveling in support of the bigger sides in Europe, who will also probably be progressing for a couple of rounds, this will add up to create a serious environmental impact.
the obvious alternative is, to a degree, off the table. Train journeys beyond London would simply take too long to be feasible, many needing an additional day or two off work in most cases. With some supporters getting flights immediately after the match, the extra time it takes to travel by train across the continent removes it as an option. For most this then becomes a question of flying or not going to the match at all. Whilst there are some options for offsetting your journeys commercially, this is forcing supporters to seek out a way to mitigate their impact.
Callum McPhail
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