Of all the places you’d expect to find a professional footballer during the off-season, on stage at a music festival isn’t usually one. Especially at the renowned Speakers Forum at Glastonbury.
But that’s where Wycombe Wanderers‘ winger David Wheeler was last Saturday, joining a panel that included Hearts and New Zealand Women’s player Katie Rood and Elliot Arthur-Worsop, founder of the environmental sustainability charity Football for Future, to discuss how the sport can improve its efforts to help tackle the climate crisis.
The 32-year-old has been outspoken on the climate, as well as other issues including politics and mental health during his career, and was appointed the Professional Footballers’ Association‘s first-ever sustainability champion in February after aligning himself with a variety of environmental organisations in recent years.
Although Wheeler is accustomed to playing in front of thousands of fans, he admitted that walking out on stage at Glastonbury “put the fear in me”.
“It was pretty scary to be honest,” Wheeler tells i. “I’ve played in front of 30-40,000 and felt much more calm than I did talking in front of a hundred or so people at Glastonbury. It’s not necessarily something that I have loads of experience of.
“A few Wycombe fans turned up because I was there but there were lots of different football shirts represented so there was lots of varied support from all over the pyramid. For as many people to turn up who could have been watching any other gig, it was a pretty good turnout.”
The talk was timely considering football, like other major sports, has faced plenty of criticism over its response to and handling of environmental issues. Last month, a Swiss regulator ruled that Fifa, football’s world governing body, had misled fans by claiming that the 2022 Qatar World Cup would be “the first carbon-neutral World Cup” in history. Fifa has been accused of “greenwashing” by campaigners.
“It has been debunked as a completely bogus claim to make,” Wheeler says. “I do think they are just paying lip service to it. It’s desirable from a PR perspective to make them look good but I don’t think that the majority of people in power are actually in any way interested in pursuing it from a more ethical standpoint.
“If you’re talking about the top governing bodies and big competitions, football is not only not doing its bit, it’s actually being a big player in making the situation worse.
“By expanding competitions like the World Cup and the Club World Cup and putting those competitions over continents let alone countries they’re not really factoring sustainability into their thinking in any way.”
The expansion of the men’s World Cup (from 32 teams to 48 in 2026), the Club World Cup (from seven clubs to 32 in 2025), and the Uefa Champions League (from 32 teams to 36 from 2024-25) invariably means more fixtures and more travel. And more money for those overseeing the sport.
Individual clubs have also faced a mounting backlash for using private jets to travel to and from other parts of the country for matches. In March, the BBC revealed that top-flight clubs made short-haul flights in 81 out of 100 games sampled.
Liverpool‘s 33-minute flight back from Newcastle was one of the trips mentioned in the BBC investigation and caused controversy given the duration of the journey. The club were reportedly unhappy at the criticism and felt they had no choice but to use that mode of transport given their bloated fixture list.
And while Wheeler admits that the number of domestic flights being taken is “unreasonable” he has a degree of sympathy for clubs.
“The fixture congestion, especially for the lads at the top level playing in Europe and internationally, is getting ridiculous,” he says. “There’s just no way that you can recover properly between games unless you’re really slashing your travelling time. So I have empathy for that from a competitive point of view but that’s something for the Premier League, the EFL, Uefa, and Fifa to discuss.
“I think the other thing is the public transport system in this country is severely lacking. If more investment was put into the rail network to make it cheaper, more efficient, more reliable, and more regular, then I think it would be much more feasible to travel by train.”
In the meantime, Wheeler is looking to help the PFA better inform its members about environmental issues with the formation of an education programme and a player working group at the top of their priority list.
Gradually, some players are approaching the PFA to find out more about the climate emergency.
“There are plenty of women’s footballers who have come forward and said that they are interested, a decent amount more than in the men’s game which is not massively surprising, to be honest. It’s one of those things, you get a trickle at the start and hopefully more and more come through.”
While major organisations may be lacking, individual clubs are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint. Wycombe’s players and staff have swapped “gas-guzzling cars” for greener alternatives after signing up to the EV Salary Sacrifice Scheme which gives employees access to electric vehicles.
With the start of the League One season just over a month away, Wheeler didn’t stick around for Sir Elton John‘s closing performance on Sunday night, instead leaving the campsite to rejoin his family on holiday before preparations for 2023-24 ramp up.
But not without squeezing in Lewis Capaldi’s set on the Pyramid Stage on his way out.
