Climate change and energy crisis: how green is the Bundesliga?

Back in the summer, Hans-Joachim Watzke articulated a concern that is now well known in the offices of professional football companies in Germany.

If a feeling of crisis spreads in society, it is very quickly "always strikingly about football," said the boss of Borussia Dortmund, who also chairs the supervisory board of the German Football League (DFL).

This injustice was already being done to the game during the Corona period, and now that energy is running out, headlines are appearing again that are designed to trigger a feeling of outrage about football: "BVB floodlights in Signal-Iduna-Park despite the sunshine" ("Sport 1") or "2000 liters of heating oil per day for lawn heating" ("Focus Online").

The clubs fear that in the event of an acute energy shortage, demands for a cessation of the game could soon be raised again if the idea in society that football wastes energy, as if there were neither climate change nor the gas crisis, could become established.

And that fear affects both professionals and recreational sports, where thousands of floodlights come on every night during the fall and winter and maybe even warm water flows out of showers.

“A lockdown is something we absolutely cannot wish for.

We cannot keep the pitches closed for a third winter in a row," says Bernd Neuendorf, President of the German Football Association, and Donata Hopfen, Managing Director of the German Football League (DFL), in turn warns of "symbolic politics".

The energy consumption in professional football should not be judged differently than the need for gas, oil and electricity in other sectors.

FAZ survey on energy consumption

But with the spoiled millionaires from the Bundesliga playing football at 3:30 p.m. under a blue sky in midsummer with bright floodlights and then covering short inner-German journeys in a chartered plane, you can create a wonderful excitement.

Certainly also to counteract this effect, all 36 clubs in the first and second Bundesliga were explicitly asked last Monday to change the way they deal with the increasingly scarce resources.

"The DFL executive committee strongly recommends that all clubs set an individual energy saving target of 15 to 20 percent for the current 2022/23 season," the association announced, which offends no one.

"We want to become the most sustainable league in Europe," said Hopfen back in August, and the clubs have been trying to develop at this level for much longer.

Some with more effort, others less committed.

The awareness of the "pioneering role in society" is now there, for example, the Werksklub from Leverkusen reports.

At the beginning of September, the FAZ conducted a survey on energy consumption among all 18 top division companies, to which twelve clubs responded, some with pages of explanations on the measures already implemented and planned.

It becomes clear that something is actually happening.

There are hundreds of small measures within the league.

In Bremen, in the two weeks between home games, the refrigerators in the boxes that are not used during this time have recently been switched off.

In Stuttgart, the CO2 emissions caused by the team's flights have been "compensated for several years through projects with the NABU (Nature Conservation Union Germany, editor's note)".

FC Bayern wants to operate its turf heating in the Allianz Arena in the future with air heat pumps instead of gas, with solar panels providing the electricity required for this.