Our addiction to burning fossil fuels has our planet entering the early stages of a sixth mass extinction. The climate emergency demands urgent action now.

The process of hyper capitalization has transformed football into a significant driver of this crisis. Organizations like FIFA have been systematically misleading the public about the size of their ecological impact for decades, dramatically underestimating the actual climate effects of modern football. A more thorough but still incomplete accounting of the emissions from the 2026 FIFA Men’s World Cup suggests that it was(including additional emissions by only 4 tournament sponsors) responsible for 110 million tons of emissions, an amount sufficient to kill 110,000 people.

Media have largely enabled this to happen, focusing too much on objectively less important things. At this summer’s World Cup, considerable critical attention was given to each of the many outrages of the tournament—soaring ticket and concession prices, the denial of visas to Somali referee Omar Artan and fans from various countries in the global south, the mistreatment of the Iranian team by US authorities, the hydration/advertising breaks, the final’s unwelcome half time show, Infantino’s mandated ubiquity on television coverage, the Trump inspired overturning of Folarin Balogun’s red card.

Each of these situations received considerably more media scrutiny than the devastating emissions impact baked into the tournament as a whole, which in our superheated future will be self-evidently the only thing about this event that really mattered, and yet another sign of contemporary culture’s deranged priorities.

There has never been more elite men’s football played than there is today, and that is taking its toll on our planet, on the bodies of overworked players, and on overstretched fans.

Despite many greenwashing declarations, the football business has been expanding, and therefore massively increasing its emissions, year after year. FIFA and every confederation has dramatically increased the amount of football that is played in the 21st century, and with no end in sight.

Because football’s emissions are spread across a massive range of often opaque sources—sponsorship, tv and online viewing, fan travel, infrastructure construction, apparel, increased consumption, etc.—the only real solution for a significant reduction is less football.

We advocate for the degrowth of the football business as the only truly impactful way to buy us the time we need to decarbonize. We need fewer, smaller tournaments. We need less, better football for an improved game and an inhabitable Earth.