Dr Mark Doidge (Reader in Sociology of Sport), Katie Cross (Founder of Pledgeball) and Jenny Aman (PhD student at Loughborough University talk about the impact of climate change on the sport.
Timestamps
00:00 – 06:03 – Introduction to guests, background and topic of the episode
06:04 – 09:02 – What is Pledgeball now and how do people get involved? 09:03 – 15:06 – Loughborough University’s involvement in this topic
15:07 – 17:00 – Personal appreciation of the sport and reasons for involvement
17:01 – 20:39 – How does Pledgeball attempt to mobilise fans into making climate-related changes?
20:40 – 39:54 – What are common pledges and types of pledges
39:55 – 51:47 – “I hadn’t realised change is NOT a difficult thing, mobilising football fans on climate change”
51:48 – 54:32 – Cultural change in football
54:33 – 58:28 – Where is research regarding climate action and nature?
58:29 – 01:01:09 – The power of sport to be agents of change, Thank you to the guests and final thoughts
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Welcome to the experts in sport podcast brought to you by the school of sports exercise and Health Sciences at lury University today I’m with Jenny Aman ktie cross and Mark Doge and we’re going to talk about sport for climate action and nature we’ll discuss mobilizing football fans to take action on climate
Change with a specific focus on pledge ball before we look at the future of climate change research and action hello everyone thanks for coming on the podcast thanks for having us yeah thank you I know everybody’s really really busy with lots of things going on I know
We’ve got we’ve got the um the scan Symposium at lub and I know this green football weekend that people are working on so massively appreciate you guys being here what we like to do before we get started is to give a bit of context to our listeners and a bit of an
Introduction uh so they know who who they’re listening to so would it be okay for you guys to give us a brief introduction um Jenny do you want to start in and give us an introduction yourself yeah sure well thanks for the invite first Martin um yeah I’m Jenny
I’m now a PhD student at lra University trying to understand how football can be utilized to increase the acceptance and the demand for climate action and deeper social changes needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions um and yeah in 2020 I think during my master’s degree in Global Studies I did a research
Internship with Mark Doge and since then I have been working more intensively on this topic excellent thank you Katie can you introduce yourself please of course so uh I’m very happy to be here thank you Martin um I’m Katy I’m the founder and CEO of the charity
Pledge ball um and I met Jenny and Mark really through starting this up initially um through the wonderful club that is white hawk based in Brighton but I guess we’ll come more onto that later we certainly will and Mark do you want to give us a brief introduction to
Yourself please oh yeah thanks Martin and thanks for inviting me as well so I’m a sociologist ining the school of sport exercise and Health Sciences at lfra um I’m interested in a variety of areas around football fandom in particular but Sport and how we can use it for social benefit and more recently
Around sustainability and climate action um hence why we’re a organizing the Symposium but B how I got involved with pledge ball um because I had a a very random conversation with KT that came about um and the rest is history as I say excellent well I think we’re going
To learn about that history in this podcast so you’ve You’ you’ve teed me up perfectly for that um just for our our audience or potential new audience um this is actually the third podcast that we’ve done on sustainability and we’re certainly going to have more uh moving
Forward in the future in our previous podcast we talked with Dr Russell Seymour and Elliot Brown and we focused more around the issues surrounding climate change so if you’ve not heard that one already it’s episode 62 but today we’re going to focus more around mobilizing football f fans to take
Action on climate change so can we get started there um by you guys telling us why you engaged with football fans to take action in this space and and Katie can we start with yourself yeah of course I mean this starts from a very uh amateur I guess story there was no
Science behind it at all it was really came about because having taught climate change for years um I was a secondary school biology teacher it had never really it had almost become um something that I just wasn’t engaged with I talk taught it but I didn’t think it was happening
Here and now and then I when I realized um really the situation we were in um it was that choice I think between Despair and taking action so I started um doing some volunteering with Extinction rebellion and from there obviously you see people’s automatic knej responses on the
Streets even though if if you boil the questions of climate change down to questions uh that are very simple you know do you want clean air to breathe do Green Spa spaces matter to you do you want to preserve you know the current Food Systems in a way that is Affordable
The answer is obviously yes but it’s framed in such a way and the associations with climate activism are such that loads of people feel alienated so from there I started researching what we as a family could do um and then I shared that with my Grassroots football
Team um not really sure how they’d respond was fairly news to team there a squad of about 45 women from all different walks of life and I just shared with them the impact that we’d have as a collective taking action and their response was so positive and so
Questioning that some of them volunteer to set up a Grassroots tournament with me uh it was a men’s and women’s Grassroots tournament the only entry fee was to make a pledge and then we awarded the team of fans that pledged to save the most of missions as well as the team
That had won the tournament we had um free food because we’ sourced a load of waste food from restaurants we had free bike servicing Etc and just the the kind of conversations that happening on that day and it was pretty big in the end um I think there were you know 20 teams
Involved it was really encouraging and from there we took it to um what was then virtual the sport positive Summit met a lot of people working professional sports and there was such interest in this space in what we did um that it went from there and that’s then subsequently where we launched with
White hawk but really because this had been something that we just come up with that was when I immediately wanted to check that what we were doing actually worked which is why I then approached Mark to help me to design a piece of impact assessment really around it um
Yeah and then it kind of goes on from there so Mark I don’t know if you want to take over at this point but obviously this is when you then opened this up to Jenny and who jumped in there it’s a great segue to Mark can I just can I
Just ask a couple of quick questions on that so you mentioned where where it all began and where it started so what is pledge ball now because obviously I’ve been on on your website and seen where it’s at so what what is pledge ball now and how do people get involved yeah good
Question so very simply it’s a research back charity that engages and it’s actually not only football fans but we primarily focus in football but sports fans and players around climate and sustainability the aim being that you shift people’s perspectives away from this paralysis they feel in the face of climate this cognitive dissonance
Because they feel as though they can’t have an impact to a place where they feel empowered to take action because they realize they can take action um and that they can have an impact particularly as part of this existing Collective but also where they feel closer to climate action you know they
Don’t see it as a preserve environmentalists so the way that people can get involved is firstly through supporting their professional football clubs so we have a league table that runs throughout the football season and fans compete against each other to top that pledge bow League the more uh emissions you pledge
To save for a fixture the higher your Club climbs at the league table but in order to push them higher you have to get more people involved you have to maybe take on new challenges and new pledges and so it carries on like that and we pushed this out during the
Football fixtures so it’s not extraneous to that with which people are already engaged it’s simply part of that match day clubs push it out for us we work very closely with supporters group groups we’re partnered with the football supporters Association and so that’s how fans get involved the other way in which
People can get involved is is through essentially hosting their own tournaments so they can actually have a listing on the pledge ball website just like we did in that first Grassroots instance and we have a load of other sports who use that facility as well excellent great great depth there just a
Quick challenge to you who’s top of the league at the moment oh goodness actually I tell you what as of yesterday it’s Norwich yes well done I’m on it right now and probably unsurprising L forest green row is a second although maybe you’d expect them to be TP I think
What you might be seeing right now though is the green football weekend reskin because you’re right you are right so we have the reskin and that will be the green football weekend cup so this is um a kind of Standalone couple of weeks but Norwich I think are
Also top of the Pledge B League only as of yesterday they’ve just overtaken Charlton my other question I might be wrong on this because I I did have a look um I seem to be disappointed because I couldn’t find Nottingham Forest on it are we not are we not on it are we
Not any Forest fans friends need to get involved okay so well it’s a good job the city ground isn’t close to the river and might get flooded like doting and rugby just next door to it so yeah yes it did the Rugby Club got extremely flooded and the Trent was very high only
A week ago so yes um putting it out there there Forest need to get involved um I don’t think there’s any clubs from Nottingham when I actually looked and I know numerous ones at not County and mansvi town so all of you lot get involved um anyway you segwayed very
Nicely into Mark so Mark over to you oh yeah this is one of those sort of serendipitous moments in one’s academic career where basically because you’re engaged in a particular group you piece of research or particular groups of fans or or sort of community groups that
Somehow the the ideas sort of come to you um I know when I finished my PhD I was like where’s theide ideas are going to come from and then luckily there’s people like ktie out there who have great ideas that then come to you um and
This all came about because as as was mentioned earlier um I was uh when I was living in Brighton I was a season ticket holder at White Hawk uh and on you in the seventh eth tier of of English football um and a fairly active group of fans particularly in community
Engagement so you raising money for Charities supporting refugees anti-racist and anti-homophobic and anti Seas chance but also you collecting for the local food bank and the local community um so I was just engaged in that as as a fan more than anything um but my background research was around
Football fans and sort of social engagement so that had been around anti-racism or fighting to keep your club or working with refugees or anti-hate crime different projects at different stages um and because I’d been at White Hawk Katie had actually emailed the local green counselors because the
Greens had been in minority controll in Brighton and one of those green counselors was also a fan of White Hawk and he said oh you should speak to Mark and then forwarded my email on the weird thing was is that two days previously someone else had emailed me completely
Independently asking how would we engage football fans around climate change and this was during covid when we had a slightly different existential crisis and I’m going oh this is actually something quite motivating to get my teeth into I’ve had a long history of being in and around the green
Environmental movement go you and and sport is a great space for this one of my first forms of activism was just being part of surface against sewage back in Devon and my other form of activism was protesting against my owner of the club that I grew up supporting
Plymouth alar so this was an opportunity to combine both of them and the conversation you know with two different people in in space of three days asking me about this meant why aren’t we doing something about this and I sort of opened up a whole series of questions in
My own mind the academic entrepreneur was like there’s a there’s a gap here a massive Gap um and luckily KY allowed me to exploit it at the same time I was having a conversation with Jenny who had approached me about a sport for development project I was part of an
Arasmus plus project and wanting to do an internship with me ba she was currently then based in Sweden and how to do an internal one and as an aside she sort of mentioned well I can pass this over to her because she can tell it better that her Club in Germany was
Interested in climate you green um activism and I went oh there’s yeah this person Katie had mentioned something to me and I will now pass over to Jenny to sort of add the color to the rest of that story excellent way of using football to pass over to Jenny so Jenny
Over to you yeah well I mean what is D left to say yeah I as Mark just mentioned I approached him because well during Co it was quite unlikely to get like a normal internship and as part of my uh Master’s course an internship was required so at some point they just came
Up with those research internships and I thought okay there’s research internships in gothamberg maybe I can also do one in Brighton So eventually I was able to convince Mark that this is a good idea and um yeah he he told me about like KT approaching him telling
Him about told me about pledge war and I mean doing a degree in Global Studies I think um I also had like a focus on well sustainable development so I did have that interest in environmental stuff in climate change T trying to tackle climate change already and back in 2018
Actually I did an editorial internship where I looked into German professional football clubs ecological commit M which back then wasn’t well that big as it is now maybe I mean obviously there’s still room for improvement but it’s definitely more um more um common to do something around the environment now but um yeah
So I think when when Mark said like football fans climate change was like yeah let’s do it sounds really interesting and particularly and knowing that well research today suggests that the way how climate change has been been discussed or is still discussed predominantly is not necessarily helpful
In terms of getting people on board and there’s now a challenge to find innovative ways to reach out especially to people that are not reached by the messages of traditional environmental movements and that can be done by finding smart ways to link complex issues to people’s everyday lives their
Values something that they actually do care about and for many people across the world this is football like according to FIFA I think it is around 3.5 billion now and um I’m sure Katie is going to say more about the impact that the football fan Community can have when
It comes to tackling climate change but yeah get I mean football is still one of the few phenomena where such a large group of people comes together on a regular basis to support their team and um as for example Al marks research shows football fans have proven to be an area for
Mobilization and obviously being a football fan myself helps to kind of get excited about this topic as well but yes I think that’s it just really made sense in a way really really nice summary that you’ve made there and obviously some important points there such as you’re a
Football fan so who do you support I’m supporting the best club in Germany v Gan okay okay they they might not be top of the Bundesliga at but like in terms of their social commitment and everything it’s um great Club at least like ouro they wear green that’s the
Main thing they wear green I was just going to ask Mark so you’re an ARG fan so you’re not Brighton you’re not White Hawk although you you you like them you’re an ARG fan I I’m a white hawk fan but being up in Nottingham now it’s a
Bit harder to U Follow White Hawk um on a regular Match Day experience um and Plymouth Aral are more likely to come closer to here as they did at the weekend in in hutsfield so yeah it’s a bit easier to see them now fair enough you can start start supporting L BR
Instead and k Katy are you a football fan as well I am but I’ve been quite secret about who I support up until fairly recently are are we going to put it put it out there who who is it I I’ll ta you w let’s just say we had a very good Tuesday
Night in the FA Cup uh against a particular Premier League team okay is what is that Bristol then you can’t just say Bristol brist yeah two brist clubs was it Bristol City or Rover because we we’re playing you next then AR we you are yeah that’s what I thought when he said for
Us um so an apologies is it Bristol City or Bristol Roes I I haven’t taken much not to the FA Cup to be honest unfortunately lost to Norwich last night in the FA Cup um but yes it was City who let’s say just ried West Ham slightly yeah you’re you’re apparently
Quite good at home as well aren’t you from what I’ve from what I’ve briefly heard so yeah well watch this space in the future well thank you I’m sure listeners are very you know impressed with listening to who we support in football but suppose more importantly um we’re here to talk about mobilizing
Football fans and climate change I really love it when we do get people together that really hit the nail on the head for the podcast because the podcast is here to look at Bridging the Gap between Academia and professional practice and we’ve got you know a very knowledgeable experienced researcher a
PhD student and somebody who’s taken action and we’re combining that together to discuss that in the podcast so we’re perfectly well placed we’ve we’ve had a brief introduction of what pledge ball is so question to you mark how how does pledge ball attempt to mobilize football fans into making climate related behavioral
Changes the key part of pledge ball is about making those regular pledges to say you’re going to do something that will help tackle climate change and it’s about transferring that individual action into a collective action um and that you know the the trick is and the difficulty and that’s something we want
To work on in the future is how to translate someone making a pledge and you the joke that we always had when we were talking with whiteart fans about how do we prove this is you one of the pledges is about having a shorter shower
How do we prove that you know unless we go and join them in the shower which we don’t intend to do as as ethically minded um researchers but we are relying on people to to put that forward but part of this and you know one of the
Things that that Katie is sort of keen to do and one of the reasons why football and Sport are good mechanisms to do this is because it’s regular you we know that there’s a football fixture list we’ve just talked you know about the FA Cup and we’ve just you know we
Can talk about the league and we know when those fixtures are and football fans are quite ritualistic because we’ll go to the game every other weekend we’ll go and maybe even go to the same Pub or the same Burger van before a game we’ll be talking meeting to the same people
Talking to the same people um and engaging this in in a certain way so what we want and what the the idea is is that you do this on a regular basis and eventually you start to go actually maybe I should be doing this even if you’re just pledging and just doing it
Maybe to get your Club some up the pledge ball league and looking like they’re beating their Rivals actually over time you might start to reflect and and even just sometimes putting um the pledges and actually seeing a pledge that you might not have thought about before is something that you can do and
I know myself when I started doing it it was things like Wasing at 30° for example doing my watching at 30° suddenly realized oh that could have an impact um and it wasn’t something I was necessarily aware of even though I thought I was hitting lots of things on
There um because I was doing that anyway so I think it’s part of that is a showing people that there are different things that we can do B asking you to do it on a regular basis to fit in as as Casey said earlier about fitting in with
Your reg regular Match Day experience and sort of from that those ideas embedding themselves into your routine and then thinking actually this might be something that I should actually be doing or just questioning other people when they’re you know eating a certain thing or traveling in a certain way or
Wearing a certain type of clothing you’ve touched on a few things there that that I’ve seen in your research around social norms and and challenging those social norms and educating people I think one of the pieces that that I read said there’s a quote from somebody
Saying can’t do anything about it on my own so I don’t bother and I think you just alluding there to the the the social change within small groups within individuals to then potentially grow it into something further one of the things I did want to ask you Katie was can you
Give us some examples of the types of pledge I know I know marks mentioned a couple there but you know what are the most popular ones that people take on yeah definitely and what you’ve said actually perfectly feeds into what I was about to say so in answer to that
Question first um so the pledges range from switching to using reusable water bottle as simple as that to higher impact ones like eating plant-based uh very nice I’m just just for those who can’t currently see the screen I’ve just been showcased a lovely reusable water bottle um to eating plant-based two days
A week to installing solar panels so the idea being that it’s fully accessible now what I was going to say and this I mean social norms will certainly come into it is I think it makes sense to answer this by stepping back for a start
And saying well what do we need to do in order to tackle climate change we don’t just need individual change but we certainly need it we’re working very closely with um a leading researcher called Lorraine whitmarsh and you know one of the things that the cast team or
The center for climate change and social Transformations produced in September was a paper that very clearly argued that a public engagement strategy was absolutely crucial if we are to reach our Net Zero targets and not because you need individual Behavior change in isolation but you do need individual
Behavior change but partly because that entirely feeds into systemic change you know we’re not going to get the rapid transition in infrastructure that we need to see without demand being made but if I went to people and said I’d like you to uh make very clear by
Standing on the street with me or by writing to your Council or voting differently that you care about climate that’s not going to happen because for for a couple of reasons one is as I mentioned earlier this paralysis that people fail this feeling they can’t have an impact the second being that they
Think that taking climate action is to preserve environmentalists so what pledge B does is engage people and shift that mindset really illustrating that as a collective we can have an imp an impact with whatever we feel comfortable with so whether it’s starting with those individual smaller pledges or whether
It’s actually using your voice and essentially pledge ball takes you on that Journey from the small lower impact changes as Mark mentioned incre kind of and as Jenny’s research showed increasing that awareness around impact and the different choices that you can have that then have an impact to then feeling sufficiently empowered and
Comfortable to act as an ambassador and use your voice and you know we work very close with climate Outreach who work on exactly this and are experts in engaging people on climate and very clearly talk about the the linkage between systemic and infrastructural change and that’s
Really what pledge ball aims to do and I’m sure je Jenny can build upon this it’s it’s not a behavior change campaign you know Behavior change campaigns tend to traditionally focus on certain key behaviors and there are certain issues with that you know one being that people sometimes uh subconsciously offset those
Behaviors so if you focus on a few key behaviors they’ll you know subconsciously think oh well I’ve I’ve done that in the same way that you know if you uh maybe are dieting you might or exercising you might think oh I can eat a bit more over here
But the other thing being that it doesn’t it doesn’t affect people’s uh intrinsic beliefs and values and so they’re very uh they’re not very resilient so for example if you’ve had a behavior change campaign focused on cycling it might be that actually people uptake cycling for a while but as soon
As the weather gets bad or you get a puncture it’s slightly more difficult and therefore that doesn’t continue so what pledgeable really aims to do is focus on and I put in in quotations transformation and Jenny will probably butt in because I’ll completely misrepresent this I know this term is completely misused but
That’s that’s what it aims to do rather and then ultimately shift behaviors um through that process can I jump in because I think there’s also this is why Sport and football in particular are really important because what Katie’s alluded to there is actually what we need is structural
Change what we do need is Big Business governments to make change but we also are in a world where of populism where governments are saying oh no this is what the people want and unless the people rise up and say something they’re not going to do something and football
Is exactly it’s quite a similar space is the changes that have taken place in football have not necessarily come from I say the progressive changes in football haven’t come from um the clubs or the FAS or the football federations or the leagues they’ve come from the fans because there have been
Transformations in football there’s the big transformation of the Premier League there’s the big transformation of the Champions League which have massively increased the revenues of those leagues and that has massively increased the revenues of those clubs so that’s what I mean structural change makes a big difference to a small number of people
But actually lots of fans have also mobilized against that so what’s happened since 1992 is there’s been over a hundred clubs that’s nearly gone bankrupt or or or nearly got out of business fans have created supporters trust and supports associations to campaign to keep their clubs going to to resist some of these
Changes a couple of years ago the Super League was going to be formed and fans stopped and sort of mobilized against that and stopped it and similarly the the changes that have taken place in and around uh racism and and other forms of discrimination in the game haven’t come
From oh a nice you know lovely Club president who says this is the right thing to do is come from players and from a certain group of fans pushing back on this and saying this isn’t acceptable so equally in the same sort of space and the same sort of movement
Around the environment is it’s about the people saying we need to actually do something about this and the problem is is that all the research shows and there’s a very good psychological reason for this is it is so big it’s so complex and so difficult that it makes us feel
Very small and in significant and the danger is is that and my my fear as well within the sports space is that it the blame will be put on fans and that they are the ons that need to do something about it when actually it’s the clubs and the federations and more importantly
The governments that should be doing it but it is also a natural thing it’s like well this is too big and scary I I’ll shut it down people you know the example I always use is that people living in Naples know that vvus might go off at
Some point and you know do another Bombay but if you lived like if you could constantly fearful of that you wouldn’t live your life we and again the more brutal one is we all know we’re going to die but if we spend our every waking moment thinking we’re going to
Die we’re never going to live and that’s the same thing about climate change it’s so big and scary that actually a lots of people just say I don’t know what to do I’ll switch it off but actually that’s the worst thing that can happen because governments won’t do anything about it
And the actions that are required just means that the the you greenhouse gas is Contin the world continues to you know to to heat up floods will become more prevalent you snow melts etc etc which will impact us and by the time we realize oh this is the problem it’s
Probably too late so what pledge B does and what Casey was saying is highlighting that these little things that we can do but equally we can do this collectively and then also that Consciousness race and to say well actually maybe I should care about the environment around my football ground I
Don’t want it to be messy and horrible or polluted I want it to be a nice world I want our football players to be able to compete in a in in a world where where they’re not overheating or or particularly in Grassroots football or Grassroots Sports I want to watch my
Team but I can’t watch it because it’s regularly flooded um and that’s something that will happen with lots of sports clubs because flood planes tend to be quite flat which are perfect for sport pitches but they also means you know as it says on the tin they’re flood
Planes they flood and that you know if there’s more um water in the atmosphere that will come down meaning more floods meaning we have less Sport and actually there is actually a reason for us to do this so getting us thinking about that making those connections to something we
Our local community and things we care about like sport then you know maybe we can then start pushing our politicians to do what they need to do and you know we’ve seen that with with you know football trusts and with anti-racism initiatives etc etc in football and in
Other sports you we can do this you you you’ve sumarized that really nicely as utilizing football fans as as agents of change and I think that’s stealing language from some of your research to be honest Mark um and I like you know empowering football fans to be the
Leaders of change instead of thinking they’re powerless um and and pledge ball seems like a great tool to to educate in in one element to make you have that deeper understanding of what changes and what things can I do to make change and then ideally growing that movement from
You as an individual to you as your circle of influence and your your friends group to then your Club to then you know bigger movements within football again just some of your other research that I’ve looked at before I think you talked about some of the Ultras that you’ve done research on and
How actually yes we’ve all got Rivals but at times and at Big times and big problems you often come together I think you mentioned something about flooding in Italy where two Ultras teams actually the Ultras of each of those sides came to together could you just give us that
Example and then we’ll then we’ll move on because I really like that I think this is one of the intrinsic um paradoxes of football fandom and sport in general which is um it’s intrinsically competitive and about rivalries but you actually also need to cooperate to put on a league and to put
On a cup competition and you need to cooperate um and equally you know the beauty of sport is that on one hand you’re both doing a Shar activity so both coming together to play a cricket match or to play a football match but equally you’re also heavily divided
Particularly at the end of the match when there’s a winner and a loser so you’re both doing the same thing but also completely divided and rivalries are intrinsic part of sport and football in particular but equally it’s about coming together recognizing those shared issues and again this is why think football
Fans are really important um V you agent of change here and to link that back to the history of football fan activism is yeah football fans might compete but what happened in the 90s is there was suddenly a realization that hang on that thing that’s happening to that other
Club could actually be happening to us Brian HOV Al were a great example of this in that their owner at the time Bill Archer wanted to a well didn’t want to he did he sold the ground and then moved them to Gillingham 50 miles away with you know horrendous access from
Brighton but fans of other clubs who was actually a Plymouth arar fan came up with the idea of having fans United lots of fans of different clubs coming to Brighton H albian and supporting them and recognizing that actually this could happen to us and that is sort of what’s
Happening is that that’s the you know the birth of the football supporters Association recognizing there are shared difficulties and structural problems in the game now in some cases those fans Germany’s pretty good at doing this um and in other countries as well and you do have National federations ironically
Italy’s probably not the best one and some of those rivalries are really entrenched where they won’t work together but equally football fans are those people who do care about their Community football clubs invariably are named after a part of the city or the city itself or maybe even the
Region bands intrinsically identify with that region so even if you’re not a m you know not from Manchester people who are Manchester United fans or Manchester City fans have an affinity to that City you know this happens around the world so when something happens say a
Flood and it happened in the r in Germany happened in a club that I did my PhD research with in lorno where there were floods those fans those alteras came out and mobilized to help the cleanup operation because they are a network of fans who are coming together
Every week to support a club so when there’s another issue then actually they can mobilize to support that as fans have done in this country around food banks about you know they know that every Saturday we’re playing a game let’s support our local community it’s not necessarily about football but it’s
About our community and the people around it and that’s what we’re trying to do here is you know the climate change is going to affect our communities and often it’s going to affect the most uh marginalized and the poorest in our communities not just locally but globally and therefore okay
How do we think about this in a slightly different way and think about us as football fans and what we can do to do something about it trying to link back to a couple of points that Mark and Katie made but I mean it’s this talking about floods right and pites being
Flooded and everything I think we’re really missing an opportunity here because also in general like when we talk about flooding and also in Germany there has been I mean most Germany has been flooded like just um over Christmas basically we kind of missed making that connection between like extreme weather
Events and climate change and that like doesn’t happen in football either what we do instead and Mark mentioned that as well is like blame it on fans like the whole the entire discourse or an a very big part of the discourse around climate change and football is that 70 or more
Than 70% of emissions stem from fan travel so the problem seems to be fans traveling to matches but what what we don’t talk about is that for example UEFA then artificially expands their like International competitions such as the Champions League recently or all the dodgy sponsors that we have that are
Like basically sponsoring the competitions and also fueling the climate emergency so um there is definitely Tendencies to see that and we’re not really making use of the opportunities that are out there as well and then talking about climate is also not necessarily something that we just
Do for a casual small talk like I think even like neither of us here in this conversation feels that comfortable about raising the issue with the football fan next to them in the stands and that’s where I think the research that we did was quite powerful around pledge ball because having this um
Visibility of other fans taking action in form of the leag table it actually enabled conversations and not just amongst fans like they started having conversations in their WhatsApp group like just asking for vegan recipe ideas and like I don’t know just on Saturdays were like okay what have you pledged
Have you have you made your pledge like what did you do and they just started sharing their experience and just helping um themselves overcome some of the barriers that you face when you try to live a more environmentally friendly life but it also it also helped having
Conversations with the club so the club actually saw hey it’s not just one individ ual fan who thinks it’s important to talk about climate or to do something around climate change it’s more fans and then with whitew for example they started to uh like talk with the local public transport company
For example to make it easier to get to the ground using public transport they talked about having recyclable cups on Match days having recycling bins like all these kind of things were a result of it just being more visible that there is demand and it goes back to what Katie
Said as well you don’t necessarily want to be seen as the climate activist or something but with this leak table it’s not like you it kind of creates this okay it’s a we we are collective and we demand change and that was yeah just very powerful to
See what kind of impact they had had with fans the conversations that fans have are very powerful but they can also they can disrupt or they can just reinforce the and I think this is one of the the key areas and I think something for future research really is is how do
We you how do how do we have an influence over those conversations because I remember being told by a psychologist that there was a piece of research about floods in boss castle and that in in Cornwall um and the closer that the researches got to boss castle
The less likely they were to think it was climate change and it was interesting because when the floods were in Britain over the last couple of weeks I was I sort of had a look on social media and I noticed a conversation and this isn’t there sort of pull out to
Criticize the fans of this club but it was talking about shrewbury town for example and there were floods in the river there um and but then equally what I saw in the conversation was well the old gay Meadow which was right next to the river used to flood all the time and
It happened quite regularly so as you can see is once you get closer to the the club or to the the community there will be specific local issues or local history or local knowledge that might actually be used to say well actually it’s always flooded but actually what we
Really need is the research to say well actually yes it did Flood but it flooded every 10 years and actually it’s flooding every year now or every two years and that’s the difference and it’s making that connection because otherwise it’s easy to dismiss and go well it’s always flooding because it’s a flood
Planate but actually if it’s flooding more often or the club is losing more money because of the flooding or the type of flooding is changed that’s what we need the research in not just making that very glib connection because obviously it is a flood plane it’s called a flood plane it will have
Flooded but it’s whether it’s changing and having those conversations with fans rather than coming in and saying you know shw town you don’t know what you’re talking about go well actually you do know what you’re talking about you have very specific knowledge but actually how do we work with that with the additional
Research to think okay actually maybe there’s something changing here and these are the connections and therefore if you care about your Club this is something we need to think about it’s it’s a good general you know overall yet specific case study um you know provided
There into how we can make change and I think Jenny started to mention earlier about some of the specific research that you guys have done on on pledge ball so I know that you have published some things and I really like the title around I hadn’t realized that change is
Not a difficult thing mobilizing football fans on climate change um and I think this was the research that you specifically did on pledge ball so would you guys be able to talk us through what the research was and and what your findings were well basically what we did
Or the study had two main aims and firstly it was to find evidence for football fans being a promising yet not considered Collective when it comes to mobilizing an existing community to take climate action and then secondly as you rightly mentioned it was to make sense of fans attitudes towards climate change
And climate action but then basically using the pilot partnership between pledge ball and the non- leag club whitew for um in East Brighton to well find answers to that and just because you already mentioned the title of the the paper that we published I think one of the most interesting things was that
Like we talked about the different pledges that you can make um when engaging with pledge B and it was actually that experimenting with these pro- environmental changes it just shifted people’s perceptions of change in a more General way so they were actually H okay it’s not that difficult
To change to recycle uh l r l RS is that how you pronounce it correctly or like to yeah okay Katie’s laughing so that’s reassuring but no but it got people thinking so even people who haven’t actually registered their pledges online just by looking at this list of
Different options which ranged from yeah I don’t know using a reusable cup to change to Green bank or stuff like this made them think about things and they understood that it can be quite enjoyable especially when you do it as part of a bigger group and it can be
Beneficial for yourself for the broader football community and also in that case for the environment and um it it was more about like this negative perception of change that we all have like right we need to I don’t know move houses we need to I
Don’t know start a new job or I don’t know just making decisions in front of a shelf in a supermarket um it’s kind of daunting and it’s not very pleasant and so not just when we do think about environmental changes but yeah so we really found that when people started
Experimenting with those changes they were like oh actually it’s not that hard or okay going vegan well vegan dishes can actually taste quite well so what else in my life haven’t I tried to change just because I was afraid of the the uncertainty around it in a way so
That was very powerful but um yeah also going back to the more like direct findings and we had both environmental well I called them newcomers I think and already environmentally Weare people um that perceive making pledges in support of their team as a new a motivating and
A fun way to engage with the topic of climate change but also and I think that’s very important with each other and I think um Katie is happy with me saying this but when I say pledges I think I do have to clarify that pledge war strategy goes beyond just asking
People to promise committing to more environmentally friendly behaviors because the the charity actually provides communication packages that include for example subal reminders draw on the characteristics and regularity within football and it then connects making those promises to the fixture calendar calendar and we mentioned the regularity before basically draws on
This element of competition like asking fans to compete against other fans and that was just something they haven’t experienced before which fans really like resonated with and I said that before like this aspect of visibility um needs to be emphasized because really demonstrated to fans that other fans are concerned that take
Action as well I also and we said that before about this well others don’t bother so why should I and quite often we don’t really see into our neighbor’s house for example or the conversations that people have like unless someone installs a solar panel on their roof so
This visability in like in form of the need table just enabled conversations as I mentioned before the group chat um people asking for a substitute for cling film vegan recipes all these kind of things and fans perceive their group as a safe space to ask those questions so
Quite often when you talk to someone who’s very well educated I say on climate and like behaving an environmentally friendly way you’re kind of and I feel like that quite often like kind of I’m scared of you know just asking okay but if I can’t have D Dairy
Anymore like what else is there or you know having these kind of conversations um they felt safe to have them there we mentioned the the element of of verification before and that pledge ball has deliberately decided against it because there’s also research s suggesting that this is a major barrier
Especially for people who do not yet identified strongly with the topic so letting people voluntarily choose the change they want to make and then making those impacts visible supporting people while experimenting with those changes is very important and yeah as I said before doing it for the team has been
Found to provide for some people good enough excuse to actually start experimenting and yeah the impacts of climate change on football they are not necessarily that visible so even environmentally very aware fans they mentioned that you only need a pitch and a ball to be able to play football and
It didn’t really see that football is experienced negatively or the athletes hell for example as well I mean had very hot summer again now the pictures are flooded so yeah there is some I think still some opport Unity to talk a bit more about this but yeah I think this
Was um these were one of the major findings I don’t know if Katie wants to add to it or Mark well I was going to add it about yeah the key thing is is you I alluded you one of the reasons I liked white hawy they were very
Community orientated and and for the UK listeners many people might be aware of Brighton as a particular as a particular stereotype of Brighton in the UK quite a a liberal sort of um think goes um sort of community um as I alluded they had a minority green Council for a couple of
Years so the fact and it’s the only the only city in the in the country that’s had a UK um green MP so one could argue that writing is a particular case study it’s a very unique case study but actually there are very key findings that we can extrapolate from this which
Is one is you know particularly for organizations like KT and pledge ball is if you’re going to engage with football fans actually engage them as football fans and learn something about the club don’t just go in and start talking at them or trying to suggest that they
Might need to be educated because the chances are they probably know a little bit more about their Club than you do and so just connect to their history and their community and what what matters to them um the other thing is is to actually talk to the fans themselves and
Engage the fans because often in football as I said you know they are seen as an irritants they are people to be regulated or controlled as opposed to actually the people that keep the club going especially when those clubs are facing you know collapse um they’re the
Ones that the fans are the ones that step into save the club and keep them going but so talking with them engaging with them as as Jenny said doing it on their terms and in their way is the most important thing and the and the third thing which is you know can be
Generalizable you beyond a club like white haulk is the club actually does something because most fans will know that their Club says they’re going to do something and then don’t do it and we also can say the same thing about politicians and employers and all sorts
So if if the fans ask for something and the club says it’s listening then it’s important for the club to actually do that thing to show that it’s been listening so that the the fans can see that actually the club’s doing something about it and that’s what happened at
Whiteall so it becomes this virtuous circle where actually we know something about our club you we are being listen you know we’re speaking up for it and the club’s doing something about it and those sort of principles should be quite Universal for any any club or any sports
Club really it’s you engage the people on their terms speak to them and then enact what they’re actually asking for and then you might get some action thanks Mark it sounds like the research showed some really really good findings there how how did you find the research
Katie did did the did it have any impact for you a huge impact I mean to be frank there’s no there’s no way I’d continue to do this work unless what we were doing was answering the problem that I wanted to solve essentially you know we have to
Have a way of framing climate change in a way that is a tangible and B really illustrates the impact we can have I mean you know we’re in a dire situation when it comes to climate change but then you could look at it in another way well and some people would say
There’s so few people who’ve been engaged around it or be mobilized around it but then you could you could turn that around and say well there are so few people who be mobilized about it so imagine if they were just mobilized I mean there’s you know there’s um science
That suggests that it takes just 25% of a group of people adopting simply adopting a new social Norm to reach an inflection point that then triggers a cultural shift so by mobile izing people to start to prioritize sustainability there is huge potential to drive really radical change the research for me meant that
Pledgeable could continue or that I would continue because you know up until May of last year I was doing this on a voluntary basis um so it meant that I wanted to continue because it clearly worked um and actually since then and going to Mark’s point about the
Demographic of Brighton since then we’ve had another thorough piece of impact assessment carried out with our work with bam County fa and we’ve worked with them and the Grassroots clubs there for two seasons now and again I mean it was a different um methodology here and the statistical analysis showed a really
Significant beneficial impact both from an environmental and a social standpoint so it definitely works there’s no doubt about that and it means that I continue to have that drive but also all of the findings mean that it Con informed strategy um one of the key things that
We always ensure is that we are constantly questioning everything that we do so I have one to ones with Jenny to ensure that I never go off the rails or got distracted um but also we work with you know other PhD students who are on our volunteer team and we work with a
Number of universities who we basically provide Master’s uh dissertation project proposals to and a lot of their Master students including left Bry then carry out those particular projects to feed further into our strategy it’s great you demonstrated the impact that the research has had and even if that is just kind of clarifying
And verifying that that your work is doing what it’s intended to do and you’re showing those kind of additional changes and the development that’ gone on from that confidence that’s come from having the research behind you know your ideas um that’s brilliant what do you
See as is the next step for pledge ball you mentioned kind of getting a 25% change to to kind of facilitate cultural change is that is that one of the things you’re trying to lead to and how might you get to that 100% so that’s our ultimate Vision that’s that’s absolutely
Where we’re aiming for and what’s quite nice you know we’re a charity and so we are strictly governed by Meeting those charitable objectives which is absolutely that um so there are a few ways obviously you know this breaks down into Financial as well and but in terms
Of us driving forwards I guess you could break it down into two main pillars one is increasing Outreach so that at scale engagement you know pledgeable is incredibly scalable and what’s really nice about it as Jenny touched upon earlier is that the tool itself is intended simply to be used and to spark
Conversations within existing communities so one of the I would say most effective ways in which we’ve seen fellow fans engaged is through the supporters trusts we’ve worked with so you know there’s a group of Burnie supporters called the sustainable clarets there’s a group of well the canaries trust the Norwich fans um
Swinden Town supporters Club um you know all of these supporters groups who use Pledge ball as a means of encouraging others to take action amongst their peers and therefore spart conversation that way because of that um you know because of the resonance they already have within the community we see
Significant uptake there same with Huddersfield Town supporters Association the other side of course is continuing with the research to continue to ensure that we are engaging and supporting people on this journey from you know making sustainable Choice themselves to using their voice in the most effective way possible so we we’re
Developing that through working continuing to work with researchers to ensure that we can set up these means of support whether that’s online communities to facilitate as Jenny said those safe spaces in which people can talk about the changes they’re making talk about climate change go through that almost grief process from realizing
What you’re facing to then spurring them into action to you know offline commity Community groups meeting to um you know potentially individual apps although there’s limited yeah we have uh there are various considerations around that but yes so two main pillars I would say in terms of pledgeable firstly
Increasing Outreach encouraging as many supporters groups as many clubs as many sports to take this on and use it to fit their community and ensuring that then we’re supporting those users those pledge Ballers those people who have joined our community in really driving this change it sounds
Really exciting lots of exciting kind of developments happening with pledge ball and similarly on the side of research Mark and Jenny where where where is research at the moment and what’s what’s happening moving forward in in this space well I think it’s it’s Cas he alluded to is
Sports at the beginning of his journey and I think equally academics are one of the re one of the reasons I got excited and got involved with this a couple of years ago is realizing that actually there isn’t that much academic research in this space um and that’s one of the
Things that I’ve sort of run with since I’ve come to BR lra which is about okay how do we start to mobilize the academic community in and around sport to actually take this this matter seriously and again we keep mentioning it but it’s a big problem and no one individual can
Fix it and no one research area can fix it and no one discipline can fix it um so it’s requiring um a variety of different ways of of approaching it and one at lb is there are different groups of people you know design school or in um you working around sustainable pitches
Or our Sports Science colleagues thinking about you athletes running in the Heat or in extreme conditions so there’s lots of different ways that sport needs to address this but equally about the management of Sport the facilities the the the recycling or upcycling of equipment and and sports
Jerseys and you know the social movement of athletes and fans actually wanting to speak about this there’s lots of different approaches and there’s only you know a dozen or so sort of people who’ve looked at this in the UK with a few more in the US so it’s all at very
Sort of baby steps at the moment but it’s about the importance is one thing I’ve worked out with Kae is the and case’s highlighted as well is you know it’s it’s the collaboration it’s the Partnerships we have to work you say if I’m going to say we should be working
With fans we should also be working with national governing bodies and working with clubs and working with athletes and working with people you know various stakeholders that it’s we’re all taking baby steps but we all go in the right direction and the same direction rather than throwing a weight around and saying
This is what needs to be done because there is limited research in this space why you say that Mark I mean we definitely do need more case studies and all this but I think also one thing that I don’t know sport being rather laid to this whole party or not it’s not really
A part party is it but like sport joining this whole this sustainability discourse and climate action discourse rather late um also means that there has been research done around particularly engaging people engaging audiences on climate um which not necessarily has Sports written all over it but from what
We can see so far it can also be applied to sport communities because I mean a football fan not just a football fan that person is also like has different net is part of different network Works um has different identities and all these kind of things so what I would
Definitely say and I really do hope that well there’s more and more organizations in sports like K’s um organization pled for example that engage with the existing research around particularly engagement in climate that is already out there I mean climate Outreach has already been mentioned they a great organization they’ve been around for
Many many years focusing especially on this there’s been a lot on how to make events more sustainable even though it might not be sports events but there is work being done and I think yeah as I said we’re rather late um to this now so I think sport really can be the front
Runner in engaging with the existing research and just trying to not make the same mistakes that we’ve been making the last I don’t know 50 60 70 years um yeah just catch up and lead by example thanks for that thanks for the summary there and some really key
Points added there Jenny I really appreciate you all coming on and spending this time talking to us about this from from my brief summary it does seem like you guys just mentioned how how late sport is to this Arena and how much in its infancy it is in terms of
Research but if we go back and look at the power of football and the power of sport that you demonstrated earlier that it’s done in other other areas to be agents of change and kind of show how pledge ball has this potential and and as demon research where actually
Football can make these changes I really like the summary of pledge ball this the Simplicity of pledge ball in the education side and and and making those ideas come to life making people commit to those changes and to hopefully move it forward from individuals to communities to let’s hit that 25% and
Kind of get this moving as a cultural change I think it’s very clear that this has huge potential and I’m sure there’s many other organizations out there trying to reach the kinds of groups like football fans sports fans to make wider change in society um it’s been really
Really interesting speaking to you and I and I hope that this this movement gets pushed forward and these kind of systemic changes can happen because again stealing from what other people have said before it doesn’t now feel like we are beyond the 90th minute we’re
In kind of extra time as I think has been said by others in the past but with football there’s always hope and again marks mentioned this in some of his his research we live as football fans with constant hope you know 23 years Forest we outside the Premier League and we’re
Back okay how long for let’s not talk about that but there’s always hope we’ve all been there as football fans with hope we now need to be part of this hope and part of this change and we all now need to step forward and you know I’d
Love listeners to go on to the to your website go on to pledge ball and start making pledgers maybe picking up with their spectator groups and like I’ve mentioned Forest on on on your list let’s hope that changes maybe I can try and speak to some people and get them on
There CU I it’s pretty embarrassing that they’re not so all those people who can get involved and actually make those changes to get to this 25% to get to this cultural change is really where we need to stand really appreciate you coming on thank you for your time and
Let’s speak again in the future when things have things have moved forward thanks for listening to the experts in sport podcast if you’d like to get in touch then please contact me Martin Foster m. Foster albor cuk thanks for listening see you next time