Heroes: Forest Green Rovers
Even as environmentalists slam soccer’s World Cup for fudging its green credentials, one obscure English team is winning applause far and wide for its eco-friendly practices.
On the very day that Dale Vince took over as owner of the Forest Green Rovers in 2010, he moved to ban the sale of beef burgers at the team’s stadium in Nailsworth, a village in the Cotswolds, the rolling hills of central-southwestern England. Even bigger changes followed, and not all to the liking of local fans.
The stadium menu soon featured only vegan items, and single-use plastics were banned. Fans were told that if they didn’t like what the stadium served, they were welcome to bring their own food. The pitch is now kept green with seaweed and captured rainwater instead of pesticides, and it’s mowed by a solar-powered robot. The team often travels in an electric bus. Charging stations have been installed at the stadium for fans who drive electric vehicles.
Forest Green competes in the lowly third division of the four-tier professional English football league, yet it has won recognition from the United Nations as the world’s first carbon-neutral football club and been honoured with a “momentum for change” climate action award.
The team was close to bankruptcy when Vince arrived, but, as he told Bloomberg earlier this year, “we’ve attracted a lot of sponsors in the last couple of years that other clubs at our level don’t get.”
Vince, 61, has been an ardent environmentalist most of his life. He quit school at 15, becoming a New Age traveller with a windmill mounted on his trailer. He went on to start a wind energy business, set up the U.K.’s first electric-vehicle charging network, and formed a vegan food company.
While his activism initially drove some fans away, many more new ones have arrived. What’s more, Vince says, “Our fans come here. They see what we’ve done. They go home and they start to change the way they live.”
Forest Green is also winning more matches. A local village team for most of its 133-year history, it was promoted to the third tier of the English league earlier this year.
“I just don’t think there has to be a conflict between the environment and economics and ethics,” Vince says. As if to make the point, work is due to start soon on a new stadium for the team, made entirely from timber. It will be named Eco Park.
Zeros: LIV Golf Investments
Serena Williams, Billie Jean King and Colin Kaepernick are among a growing band of brave sports stars who have shown that sport and politics do – and indeed should – mix. Sadly, that message is taking far too long to percolate into the cloistered world of golf.
It was not until 2012 that Augusta National, home of the Masters, admitted its first women members. Now, LIV Golf Investments, led by the retired Australian star Greg Norman, is thumbing its nose at human rights activists by launching an international tour in competition with the long-established PGA.
Doling out super-generous contracts and prize money, LIV – the Roman numeral for 54, the number of holes played in its events – has signed up almost a dozen of the world’s top 50 players, among them Phil Mickelson and Dustin Johnson.
LIV might deserve some credit if the new tour was just about ending a long-standing monopoly. However, it likely would not even exist without the backing of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), which has put up US$2 billion of its oil-generated wealth to lure golfers away from the PGA. With assets of US$620 billion, the PIF is the world’s fifth-largest sovereign wealth fund.
Outsiders can only guess at the Saudis’ motivation. Is it their love of golf? A craving for power in the sports world (they also bought control of England’s Newcastle United Football Club in October 2021)? Or part of a wider strategy to flex their muscles on the international stage?
The widely held suspicion is that LIV is above all an egregious case of “sports-washing,” designed to distract from Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations, including the dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the war in Yemen, and the repression of Saudi women and the LGBTQ2S+ community.
Referring to Khashoggi’s murder, Norman told Sky Sports News, “We’ve all made mistakes.” The Saudis, he added, “want to change that culture and they are changing that culture, and you know how they’re doing it? Golf.”
We’re not so sure. As recently as August, a Saudi court sentenced Salma al-Shehab, a doctoral student and mother of two, to 45 years in prison for spreading “rumours” and retweeting dissidents.
Not that Canada is in a position to judge. This country exported more than $1.7 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia in 2021, according to Global Affairs Canada. Most of those exports were combat vehicles. No word on whether Canada is also exporting golf carts.
