On February 13, 2025, the Shift Project presented a 180 -page report devoted to the climate impact of football, and in particular the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) and the International Football Association (FIFA).
Among the many figures put forward in this study, there are two significant figures: 6 % – the share of international matches under the responsibility of these two organizations, and 61 % – the part that these matches represent in terms of carbon emissions in world football.
In question, the displacement of teams and especially spectators. The report explains that, for France only, the football competition issues 275,000 tonnes of CO2 per year, which corresponds to a year of gas heating for 41,000 families.
However, FIFA has made sustainable development one of its priorities for the coming years. We could thus expect that it seeks to limit the number of games to limit the movements caused by these demonstrations. But it is not.
FIFA continues to develop its competitions
The number of teams in competition for the Football World Cup has continued to grow: 16 from 1934 to 1978, 24 from 1982 to 1994, 32 from 1998 to 2022.
For the 2026 World Cup, FIFA acted a passage to 48 teams. It is now possible to organize the tournament every two years instead of four, and to involve several organizing countries there-for example, Canada, the United States and Mexico, for 2026.
For the 2030 World Cup, FIFA thus envisages a competition at 64 teams, this with no less than six different host countries: Argentina, Spain, Paraguay, Portugal, Morocco and Uruguay.
Also note, the arrival of the new club World Cup at 32 teams (replacing the old formula which had only seven teams) in the United States, in June and July 2025. The qualified teams this year are not necessarily the champions of major continental competitions.
Indeed, Real Madrid, winner of the Champions League-European trophy in Europe-will be accompanied by 11 other European teams, as well as six South America teams, four African teams, four Asian teams, four North American teams and an Oceania team.
To go even further in the excess of his events, the president of FIFA Gianni Infantino declared in March 2025 wanting to animate the half-time of the final of the 2026 World Cup with a show inspired by the Super Bowl.
A coherent strategy?
The organization of sporting events of this scale contradicts the challenge to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions to limit climate change. The choice to increase the number of participants – and thus the number of games to sell to business partners – seems to be a only financial vision. A classic World Cup at 32 teams and in a single country already issues, according to FIFA estimates itself, 3.6 million tonnes of CO2.
But this choice is also criticized from an economic point of view. It is important to remind FIFA that in terms of organization strategy, there are generally two large possible strategies.
- The first is the generic strategy of global domination by costs, where the competitive advantage obtained will go through the search for increase in production volumes and, traditionally, by setting up scales.
- The second is that of differentiation, where the assembly of key success factors will allow us to stand out from its competitors.
In a world where resources are limited and will be more and more difficult to access, the logic of increased volumes seems to be the least interesting in the long term. On the contrary, we can remind FIFA the interest of strategy models to assess the competitive advantages of a business.
One of these models, the VRIST, developed by Laurence Lehman-Officer and its colleagues, is based on the resources and skills of the organization which allow to obtain value.
According to this model, organizations must assess their resources and skills with regard to five key criteria: value creation: for an organization, organizing a sporting event is only interesting if this event interests enough people to get an income; rarity; protection against imitation; Protection against substitution and finally protection against the transfer of resources or competence.
To facilitate this protection, the organization can play on three levers:
- Specificity: it is a question of developing a specific product or service for a customer;
- The opacity of resources, or non-transparency: this technique keeps the recipe, if you can say, secret;
- The complementarity of resources: it allows the presence of informal links between the skills and resources that protect them. For example, having two wagons on a train is only interesting if we have a traction machine capable of moving them. The complementarity will be assessed with regard not only to the number of locomotives, but also according to their powers and the number of wagons that they can tow.
What FIFA should do
FIFA would thus have every interest in applying this logic resulting from the theory of resources by seeking to make its events rarer. According to this logic, heading for a World Cup every two years, rather than every four years, is non -sense.
Rather, she should seek to make her resources and skills inimitable, not substitutable and non -transferable, based on historical mastery, the specificity of her competitions which were intended to be exclusive by authorizing only the best world teams to participate and the complementarity of a world cup of national teams every four years with a world cup of clubs limited to seven continental champions every year.
By increasing the number of matches and competitions, the international organization in charge of football does not protect its resources and skills and does not take into account climate change. In the end, football seems to be exempt from its environmental responsibilities on the grounds that it entertains.
To reduce the environmental impact of international football competitions, the authors of the Shift Project report suggest some tracks. The two main ones are proximity – limit too many and too frequent travel by promoting local spectators – and moderation – limit the number of games.
For the moment, FIFA seems to take the opposite path, while the path to follow would be a return to a World Cup with fewer teams, where regional qualifications would regain in interest, in particular with the disappearance of competitions like the League of Nations in Europe, which dilute the interest in the queen test.
The proximity of the matches would make it possible to play on regional rivalries and strengthen the interest of spectators, as in the Brazil-Argentina or France-Germany matches.
Ultimately, FIFA should seek to offer rare global heights, generating a strong expectation, rather than offering numerous, but boring matches. This is a point on which the report of the Shift Project and the resources theory converge both.
