The World Cup 2026: Beautiful Game, Burning Planet
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This summer, I watched something genuinely exciting happen in football. Nike unveiled World Cup kits made from 100% recycled textile waste, the first time elite players have competed in kits made entirely from what would otherwise be landfill. Puma and Adidas followed with their own textile to textile recycled fibres. Fans were pointed towards Vinted and eBay for vintage shirts instead of another seasonal drop. For a few weeks, it felt like fashion and football were finally moving in the same direction on sustainability.
Then I looked at the bigger picture. Football calls itself the beautiful game but this World Cup is painting a different picture.
The 2026 World Cup is the largest in history: 48 teams, 104 matches, 16 cities across three countries. Independent analysis by carbon accounting platform Greenly puts its footprint at 7.8 million tonnes of CO2e, more than double Qatar's official 3.8 million tonnes in 2022 (a figure many watchdogs already considered understated).
What does 7.8 million tonnes actually mean? Picture every car in Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow combined, driven for an entire year. That's roughly the scale we're talking about, for one month of football.
87% of it comes from one thing: spectator flights. International supporters make up just 35% of the crowd, yet they generate 74% of the travel emissions. This isn't a stadium problem or a pitch problem. It's a logistics and design problem, baked in from the moment FIFA chose to make the tournament bigger rather than smarter.
The World Cup has always sold itself as the one event that can bring the world together, 48 nations, billions of fans, a shared language of competition and joy that crosses every border. But right now, that togetherness is quietly accelerating the very crisis threatening to make future tournaments unrecognisable. We're uniting the planet to watch football while undermining the planet we're standing on to do it.
If you want one detail that sums up the gap between intention and execution, it's water. FIFA's code of conduct initially allowed fans to bring empty, reusable bottles into stadiums. Then, weeks before kick off, that was quietly reversed: no reusables at all, citing safety. Fans were left to buy water inside, exclusively supplied by Coca-Cola, in cities where heat researchers had already flagged 14 of the 16 host stadiums as posing genuine health risks. Backlash forced a partial backdown (one factory sealed bottle per person), but the instinct to default to single use plastic, rather than work out how to do reusables safely, says everything.
Then there's Scotland. After 28 years away, the nation's return was emotional and enormous. The BBC reported that nearly seven tonnes of kit, branded and unbranded, arrived in Miami a week before the squad itself, then got shipped on to Boston, New Jersey and the team's Charlotte base. Three group games, one win, and a group stage exit later, that kit made its way home too. None of this is anyone's fault individually. It's just what happens when a tournament is built around distance rather than against it.
Contrast that with Japan's fans, who have quietly cleaned their section of every stadium they've sat in since 1998, bin bags in hand, regardless of the score. It's a lovely habit. It's also a sign of how much weight is being placed on individual fans to compensate for a structure that was never asked to behave responsibly at scale.
So what has FIFA actually promised?
This is where it gets uncomfortable. FIFA isn't a stranger to climate commitments. Back in 2021, at COP26, it signed up to the UN Sports for Climate Action Framework, pledging to cut its own emissions by 50% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2040. Its 2026 Sustainability and Human Rights Strategy talks about energy efficiency, waste reduction and environmental management plans, and points to greener stadiums and a tree planting programme as evidence of progress.
What that strategy notably does not include is a carbon target for the tournament itself, and on spectator travel, the single largest source of emissions, the strongest commitment FIFA offers is to "encourage relevant entities to set up efficient air travel routes." Encourage. Not require. Not design for. Encourage.
Carbon Market Watch put it bluntly: "the beautiful game need not cost the Earth but should inspire players and fans to be responsible custodians of our planet." That's exactly the gap. FIFA has the reach, the revenue and the platform to set a binding emissions cap for this tournament, to make host city selection genuinely about travel density rather than market size, and to stop signing four-year sponsorship deals with oil companies while claiming climate leadership. Instead, it has chosen vague language over verifiable targets, in a year when it is also the most carbon-intensive World Cup ever played.
This isn't an impossible problem. Formula 1, a sport with comparably enormous logistics, has cut its carbon footprint by 35% against a 2018 baseline while growing its calendar and audience, independently verified, year on year. Coldplay's Music of the Spheres tour delivered a verified 59% cut in direct emissions, without buying offsets to hide the gap. Both publish real numbers. FIFA, with vastly more money and influence than either, hasn't even set one for this tournament.
We're having this conversation while heatwaves are already reshaping how major events are run, while water scarcity and extreme weather are no longer rare news stories but a backdrop to daily life. And uncomfortably, this is as mild as it gets from here. Every World Cup, every tour, every big decision made now is being made in the least extreme climate we will ever know again.
Better kits and good fans were never going to be enough to offset bad design, and neither is a corporate pledge with no target attached to it. If the world's biggest tournament, and its most powerful governing body, can't bring itself to set a carbon target, allow a reusable bottle, or think twice about flying everyone everywhere, it's worth asking what exactly we're calling it the beautiful game for.