Co-hosting tournaments spiking emissions, confirms UCC study

Saudi Arabia will host the 2034 World Cup, with Spain, Portugal and Morocco confirmed as the principal co-hosts of the 2030 tournament

An extensive UCC research study, led by footballer and graduate Conor McCarthy, has found that the move towards co-hosting major football tournaments is hiking emissions.

The travel-related environmental impact of international tournaments is getting progressively worse despite the advances in fuel efficiencies, according to the analysis from 30 years of data from World Cups and European Championships.

The study comes following Wednesday’s announcement that Saudi Arabia is to host the 2034 FIFA World Cup, and ahead of the qualifying draw for the 2026 World Cup on Friday.

That expanded 48-team tournament will be hosted across the United States of America, Mexico and Canada.

A team of researchers from University College Cork – led by McCarthy, a professional footballer formerly with Cork City and now English League One club Barnsley – has found that the decisions made by governing authorities Fifa and Uefa in how tournaments are hosted and scheduled are contributing substantially to CO2 emissions.

Ireland - in the third pot of nations for Friday’s draw - were unable to fulfil their hosting of the pan-Euros in 2021 due to Covid-19 crowd restrictions. However, they were successful in a joint-bid with the UK nations for Euro 2028 finals. Dublin’s Lansdowne Road will stage six games, with an extra game a possibility due to delays in rebuilding Belfast’s Casement Park.

The study concludes that while there is increased awareness among sporting organisations around their responsibilities to sustainability, actions to reduce the environmental impact of tournaments have not been sufficient and are counterproductive in many cases.

Fifa and Uefa decisions to co-host tournaments across different countries are causing participating nations’ teams to travel further distances to for matches, leading to higher emissions.

Furthermore, the study shows that the decisions around the scheduling of matches is also imposing greater travel demands on teams.

The research team from UCC’s Department of Economics gathered data from 895 football matches played between June 1990 and July 2024, covering over three decades of the men's Fifa World Cup and Uefa European Championships.

It focused on estimating the CO2 emissions caused by the movement of teams, coaches, and other staff members.

The study involved over 16,000 individuals and looked at both international travel to the host country and internal travel between stadiums during the tournaments.

Saudi Arabia’s hugely controversial hosting of the 2034 World Cup was sealed at an online FIFA Congress

The researchers assumed all travel was done by air for consistency.

They then estimated the CO2 emissions based on standard emissions data per passenger-kilometre, considering improvements in airplane fuel efficiency over time.

The study's estimates are conservative, as they do not include fan travel or additional logistics like equipment transport.

In summation, the exercise discenred that that, unsurprisingly, tournaments hosted in geographically large countries like Brazil, which hosted the 2014 World Cup, or spread across multiple locations, such as the 2020 Uefa European Championship generated significantly higher emissions.

The data shows that tournaments held in locations further from Western Europe (Korea, Japan, South Africa and United States of America) and those held in larger countries (Russia, Brazil) or across the European continent, require greater travel by qualifying teams and higher travel emissions.

Interestingly, the tournament with the lowest internal emissions was the 2022 World Cup in Qatar due to its compact nature, where all stadiums were close to each other.

The researchers were also able to compare tournaments held within the same country. France, for example, hosted the World Cup in 1998 and the Euros in 2016.

However, when only internal travel is examined, CO2 emissions at the 2016 Euros were found to be higher than the 1998 World Cup, with an identical number of competing countries (24).

“This evidence suggests while air travel is becoming more environmentally friendly, gains are eroded by increasing numbers of players, staff and countries competing, even in Western European hosts. The increased mean and median travel distance in France during the 2016 competition, when compared to 1998, demonstrates that teams are required to travel further distances during the tournaments’ rounds,” the study states.

Lead researcher McCarthy, an Economics and Commerce Graduate from UCC who plays professionally for Barnsley FC, said:

“These finding will hopefully give organisations such as Fifa and Uefa food for thought in terms of how they organise their tournaments. Hosting group stages in single cities or regions could drastically cut the carbon emissions caused by the World Cup and Euros.

“We need only look at how the Champions League was concluded in the middle of the pandemic lockdown of 2020 for an example of how single-city settings can be used to host tournaments.

“We believe sporting bodies need to reconsider their policy of multi-nation hosts and focus on more centralised location for World Cups and Euros. In the meantime, while the decision has already been made on holding the 2026 World Cup across Canada, the US, and Mexico, more considered scheduling of games can reduce the tournament’s significant carbon emissions,” he said.

The study “Emissions from air travel and major football tournaments” is published in European Sport Management Monthly.