On June 7th, 2023 Prof. Tiberio Daddi coordinator of the research team on Sport and Sustainability at Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies participated to the ninth meeting of the European Commission Expert Group on “Green Sport”, the group of experts involved in advising the EC on preparing and implementing environmental policies in the sports sector.

Tiberio gave a speech during Session II: “Greening professional sports”, starting with a presentation of the results of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study conducted with Real Betis Balompié,
aimed at calculating the environmental footprint of a football match of the Spanish professional football club of the pre-Covid season 2018-2019.
The assessment focused not only on the environmental impacts relating to electricity, gas, water consumption, waste production of the stadium and the sports center, but also to the consumption of food and drinks, merchandising, mobility, turf maintenance, using the LCA (Life-Cycle Assessment) methodology.

The same LCA methodology is used in the Environmental Footprint (EF) calculator for football clubs, one of the main outputs of the Erasmus+ Goals project that was the focus of Tiberio’s presentation.
The EF calculator is a freely accessible technical tool that uses and processes the data provided by professional and grassroots football organisations on energy and water consumption, waste management, mobility trends, food and beverage and use of equipment to calculate their environmental impact (i.e. footprint) and to identify the main aspect that contribute to it.

The tool was presented at the meeting to a group of key sports stakeholders which included members of FIFA, UEFA and representatives of international and national sport organisations and clubs.

The environmental footprint calculator for football clubs is freely available at: www.footballfootprint.eu