Football’s most carbon-intensive World Cup will crown its champion at MetLife Stadium on 19 July, whilst the argument over who pays for its emissions has already shifted to what FIFA builds next. That is according to Azzam Abu-Rayash, an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University’s College of Science and Engineering, who used a 6 July opinion piece for Al Jazeera to call on football’s governing body to establish a Sports Climate Responsibility Fund financed through a fixed share of tournament revenues.
“The World Cup does not need to become less joyful to become more responsible,” Abu-Rayash said, with carbon accounting platform Greenly estimating the tournament will generate 7.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent and tracing 87.8 per cent of that total to spectator travel.
Researchers at Scientists for Global Responsibility put the figure as high as nine million tonnes of CO2e, which would make it the most carbon-intensive edition ever held, after FIFA expanded the field to 48 teams playing 104 matches across 16 host cities in the US, Canada and Mexico. Construction is the one line item working in FIFA’s favour, because all 16 venues were operational before the hosting rights were awarded.
That advantage disappears in the next cycle, with Saudi Arabia preparing 15 stadiums across five host cities for 2034, 11 of them entirely new builds sharing more than $20 billion in construction spending. King Salman International Stadium, a 92,000-seat Populous design due for completion in late 2029, will stage the opening match and the final, whilst NEOM Stadium will sit more than 350 metres above ground inside The Line.
History has not been kind to FIFA’s construction sums, with Carbon Market Watch finding emissions from Qatar’s seven new stadiums for 2022 had been understated by a factor of eight, a result the Brussels-based watchdog said reflected “creative accounting.” Even Stadium 974, the demountable venue assembled from 974 shipping containers, drew scrutiny because disassembly and reuse carry a carbon load of their own.
Under the Abu-Rayash proposal, an independent body would evaluate Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions spanning travel, lodging, logistics, food, waste and stadium energy, with UEFA’s Euro 2024 Climate Fund, which invested nearly 8 million euros in grassroots sustainability projects, serving as proof of concept. FIFA budgeted $11 billion in revenue for its 2023-26 cycle and has since revised that figure upwards, a sum Abu-Rayash argues makes sustainability a planning decision rather than a slogan.
Sustainably sourced mass timber “is highly durable, safe and will minimise the stadium’s embodied carbon,” Zaha Hadid Architects said of its design for Forest Green Rovers’ Eco Park, the world’s first all-timber professional football ground to win approval. The Gloucestershire venue heads a field of timber stadiums under design which now already includes Fukushima United’s demountable circular arena and Hobart’s $1.13 billion Macquarie Point stadium, whose 190-metre glulam dome will carry the largest timber roof on any stadium globally when its construction contract is (eventually) awarded later this year.
Proof at mega-event scale already stands in Tokyo’s Japan National Stadium, where Kengo Kuma threaded cedar and larch from all 47 prefectures through the first Olympic stadium in decades built with a timber frame, a venue that now serves as the main ground of the Japanese national football team. Meanwhile in Washington DC, KaTO Architecture last year pushed for the Commanders to return to a rebuilt mass timber RFK Stadium that would rank as the world’s largest rectangular timber venue if constructed.
Wood Central understands that not one of the 11 new Saudi venues specifies engineered timber as a primary structural material, with the published bid designs detailing concrete bowls and long-span steel roofs. Mass timber substitution cuts deepest in exactly those elements, because superstructures and roofs are where a stadium’s embodied carbon concentrates.
