How a Bath City FC pilot is testing whether grassroots football can shrink a sport's carbon footprint

On a July morning at Twerton Park, the stands of Bath City FC were quieter than usual, and the carbon reading for the fixture was louder than any of them. A team of University of Bath students, working with the National League South club, finished a season-long audit of matchday emissions at the club, producing what the researchers describe as one of the first like-for-like comparisons between elite and grassroots football's climate cost.

The pilot, led by students on the university's MSc in Climate Change, policy and governance programme, found that a community-level fixture produced a fraction of the per-fan emissions of a Premier League matchday, and that the gap is driven by choices a smaller club can actually control. The work is being presented to Bath City FC and to the Football Association's sustainability network this month, with the students arguing that the most credible decarbonisation route for English football is not a new offset regime, but a long, unfashionable conversation with the supporter who drives to the gate.

The numbers, and the gap behind them

Football's carbon problem is not in dispute. A 2021 study commissioned by UEFA, the game's European governing body, estimated the tournament it hosted that year produced around 404,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent across team travel, fan travel, accommodation and event operations, a figure UEFA used to justify its "net-zero by 2040" roadmap. The Premier League, in its 2022 environmental report, recorded 33,406 tonnes of CO2 equivalent across the league's 20 clubs in 2018-19, with away-fan travel the single largest category, ahead of stadium energy, club operations and merchandise.

The Bath pilot does not yet produce a tonnage to put alongside those figures. What it does, according to the student team's methodology summary, is break a single matchday into auditable components: how supporters travelled, how kit was laundered, what the food-vendor supply chain looked like, and how much waste was generated at the turnstiles. The data is local. The point, the students say, is to make it possible for a club of Bath City's size to act on it.

The structural contrast is straightforward. A Premier League club fills a 60,000-seat bowl with fans who travel an average of 90 minutes each way; a National League South side fills a 4,000-capacity ground with fans who, in many cases, walk. The emissions per fan head are not comparable in absolute terms, but the leverage points are, and the Bath team argues that elite clubs are systematically under-counting the categories a community club has the fewest excuses to miss.

The elite game, the critique, and the counter

The critique of elite football's climate record has hardened. The Football Association's own sustainability unit has acknowledged that professional clubs in the Championship and below often lack the staffing to produce a credible annual carbon inventory, a gap the FA says it is working to close through its Football Future Foundation programme. Fans groups, including the Football Supporters' Association, have repeatedly asked the Premier League to publish a single, audited league-wide figure for fan travel, rather than rely on the annual club-by-club estimates that critics say are inconsistent enough to be unauditable.

The clubs push back. The Premier League's 2022 environmental report argued that matchday travel emissions, the largest category, are "predominantly outside the direct control of clubs," a position the league restated in its 2023 sustainability update. Manchester City, in its 2023-24 sustainability disclosures, said that reductions in stadium energy use and waste had been partially offset by an increase in away-fan travel as the club returned to UEFA competition. Liverpool, Aston Villa and Tottenham have all invested in on-site solar, battery storage and LED floodlights in the last three years; the Premier League says the average club's stadium energy intensity fell 14 per cent between 2019 and 2023.

The counter-frame, and it is the one the Bath students are effectively working from, is that elite football's carbon ledger is structurally a finance problem dressed as an engineering one. A club that offsets a long-haul pre-season tour cannot, at the same time, ask its own supporters to change how they travel. The pilot at Twerton Park is small, but its design deliberately refuses both temptations: no offsets, no symbolic gestures, just a list of choices the club already has the power to make.

What the Bath model actually changes

The pilot, as described in the students' interim write-up, is built around three operational changes. First, a kit-laundering trial with a local supplier using a heat-recovery system, replacing the conventional hot-cycle commercial laundry the club had used. Second, a matchday travel survey distributed at the turnstiles, with the explicit goal of producing a verifiable per-supporter figure, not an extrapolated one. Third, a food-vendor audit covering sourcing distance, packaging and food waste, conducted jointly with Bath City FC's caterer.

None of these interventions is novel in isolation. The pilot's novelty, according to the supervising academics, is that the data is granular enough to be compared across fixtures and across seasons, which most community-club sustainability work in England is not. The Football Association's 2021 sustainability survey of the men's and women's pyramid found that only 31 per cent of clubs in tiers three to six had a written environmental policy, and fewer than 15 per cent had ever measured matchday emissions. The Bath students argue that, until that baseline shifts, the national debate will keep revolving around Premier League disclosures whose assumptions are not auditable by anyone outside the clubs themselves.

The structural reading, in plain terms: the climate cost of football is a function of three variables, scale, travel and energy intensity, and the first two of those are concentrated at the top of the pyramid. The Bath model is not going to fix that, and the students say so on the record. What it can do is give the FA, and the local authorities that fund community sport, a defensible methodology for asking what a low-emission matchday actually costs, and what it actually saves.

Stakes, and what is still missing

The pilot's limits are real, and the team is candid about them. The Twerton Park sample is one club in one city over one season. The travel survey response rate, while higher than the team expected, is not high enough to drive league-wide claims. And the energy side of the ledger, the category the Premier League has the most direct control over, is essentially absent from the Bath dataset, because the club rents its stadium and does not own the energy contract.

The contestable question is whether community-club work like this is a substitute for elite-club disclosure, or a complement to it. The Premier League's position is the latter: a spokesperson for the league said in response to a query on this work that "sustainability is a whole-game effort," and pointed to the league's joint work with the EFL and FA on a pyramid-wide reporting template. The Bath students' position, fairly stated, is that the elite game will not produce a credible figure until community-level data forces it to. Neither claim is provable from one season at Twerton Park. The work continues into the 2026-27 academic year, with the team planning a second venue and a fuller transport survey in the autumn.

The question worth watching is whether the Football Association, which is due to publish an updated sustainability strategy before the end of 2026, treats the Bath methodology as a template or as an interesting pilot. The difference between those two readings is, in carbon terms, the difference between a real baseline and another paragraph in another league sustainability report.

Desk note: this piece treats the Bath City FC pilot as a working experiment, not a verdict on football's climate record. The numerical comparisons with UEFA and Premier League figures use those bodies' own published methodologies, which the students argue are not directly comparable; readers should treat the elite-game figures as context, not as benchmarks the pilot has met.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFA_Euro_2020_sustainability
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premier_League
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_City_F.C.