2030 FIFA World Cup on 3 continents

2030 FIFA World Cup on 3 continents

Many football teams and fans will be travelling around the world for games on three continents during the 2030 FIFA World Cup. This is causing concern about the damage that this will do to the environment.2030 FIFA World Cup on 3 continents

The dates of the 2030 and 2034 World Cups will be announced on Wednesday. It is expected that the events will cover a lot more land, which will increase the amount of greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Saudi Arabia is the only country that wants to host the tournament in 2034. For 2030, Morocco, Spain, and Portugal have joined forces to bid, and Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay are all planning to host a game.

The Centre of Sports Law and Economics at the University of Limoges’ Guillaume Gouze said that FIFA has a “moral responsibility” to plan its tournaments in a way that takes climate change into account.

He said that the plan instead called for World Cups that are “ecological aberrations.”

“Crazy idea,” said Benja Faecks of the NGO Carbon Market Watch, which checks the climate promises of big events. He told AFP that it’s harder to greenwash in sports these days, or “sportswashing,” because academics and activists are holding organisations accountable.

But she said that the area where the 2030 tournament would be held was “an unfortunate choice.”

When events take place in places that are thousands of kilometres apart, teams and possibly hundreds of thousands of their die-hard fans have to take a plane to get there.

Three games will be held in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay to celebrate the event’s 100th birthday. It all began in Montevideo.

David Gogishvili, a researcher at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, said that FIFA wants to see more people around the world be able to play football.

But, he said, “it’s a crazy idea because of how this choice will hurt the world.”

FIFA has already increased the number of teams that can compete. In 2026, the tournament will be held in Mexico, the US, and Canada, with 48 teams competing, up from 32 teams in 2022.

A professor of sports management at the University of Rouen in France says this is “almost worse than the Cup on three continents.”

When there are more teams, there are more fans who want to go to the games, which means that hotels and restaurants need to have more space and there is more trash.

For 101 games, the tournament will be played in neighbouring countries that are close geographically and have a lot of well-developed transportation links and infrastructure. The only games that won’t be played in those countries are those in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

Also, early this year, the oil and gas company Saudi Aramco became a major sponsor in a deal that is controversial and lasts until 2027.

More than 100 professional female footballers from 24 countries wrote an open letter in October calling for the deal to be cancelled because it was bad for human rights and the environment. They said, “FIFA might as well pour oil on the pitch and set it on fire.”

Fan zones: Researchers say it’s not enough to just reduce the size of the footprint.

Qatar had to build new, air-conditioned stadiums for the 2022 World Cup because the site was “compact.” These stadiums were rarely used again.

One way to make things better would be to follow the International Olympic Committee’s rule and not give the World Cup to a city where nothing is finished yet, said Gogishvili.

To cut down on air travel, another idea is to save a lot of stadium tickets for fans coming from within a few hundred kilometres and promote train travel.

Like other experts AFP talked to, Gouze wants more fan zones to be built in cities where football is popular so that football fans can have “a collective experience” in front of a big screen.

But FIFA would have to agree to this if they didn’t want the World Cup to lose money.

Ronan Evain of Hamburg-based Football Supporters Europe said that football fans are like the rest of the population in that more and more of them care about the environment compared to just a few years ago.

He used the example of the 2002 Cup, which was co-hosted by Japan and South Korea, to show that co-hosting is not a problem in and of itself. However, the 2030 tournament gives fans “too many questions.”

These include the costs to the environment and the money fans have to spend to follow their teams around the world.

However, Antoine Miche, director of Football Ecologie France, said that die-hard fans will not let the long flight stop them.

He also said, “Passion can make you do things that don’t make sense.”