FIFA’s 2026 World Cup could emit 70 million tons of CO2 with deadly human costs

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Now less than a year away, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is already proving to be a hugely contentious event, particularly in the context of the volatile and increasingly totalitarian US political climate under President Donald Trump. 

I have previously argued here about the grotesque use of the tournament to legitimise his ecocidal energy regime, and credible concerns have been raised by many about the safety of visiting fans, about the potential impact of travel bans, regarding discord between the host nations related to Trump’s tariff war, and so on, all of which have culminated in what is likely to be the first of many organised calls to boycott the tournament. 

To these, we might add another, less politically contentious, and more straightforward objection to the upcoming event: the human costs in premature deaths.

According to the literature on the human impacts of the climate emergency, the 1000 ton rule refers to a formula that for every 1000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere, approximately one person will die prematurely as a result. More on the formula later, but applying it to expected World Cup emissions, the 2026 World Cup could lead to the premature deaths of 69,777 people.   

In this article, I will show how I arrive at a figure for World Cup-related emissions of 69,777,892 tons which - using the 1000 tons formula - will lead to the premature deaths of 69,777 people. It is also a figure that is more than 18 times greater than the preliminary estimate in the bid for the 2026 World Cup.  

There is no set framework for calculating carbon emissions of mega-events

How could we end up in this situation? The C02 emissions estimate for the 2026 World Cup currently in use is 3.7 million metric tons, which, if true, would make it the deadliest sporting carbon bomb in history. However, this number significantly underestimates the actual impact of the tournament for several reasons. 

It should be clarified at the outset that an agreed-upon framework for calculating the true carbon footprint of these mega-events does not exist, necessitating a good deal of guesswork. The widely cited 3.7 million tons figure is derived from an environmental impact assessment (EIA) done by the sustainability consulting firm ARUP in 2018 as part of the United 2026 bidding process. 

Even they acknowledge that “[A]t present, there is no standardised or agreed methodology for undertaking a carbon footprint of major sporting events.” 

Instead, they utilise the typical approach, which is to duplicate the previous estimating practices from various other mega-events.

It is also true that these assessments are frequently done by or for sporting bodies who have an incentive to underestimate the environmental impact of their activities in line with their many green declarations. This is a greenwashing tendency that various environmental watchdog organisations and legal bodies have identified.

For instance, FIFA was found guilty by Swiss advertising regulators of misleading the public about Qatar 2022 being carbon neutral, and emissions calculation expert Mike Berners-Lee suggested the tournament would emit at least 10 million tons, more than triple the official estimate. 

The desire to appear green leads to convenient omissions in the types of pollution that are included in their estimates. As such, much remains uncounted in these accounts, despite the now voluminous data associated with increased consumption during mega-events. 

Thus, no consideration is given to the impact of increased global spending on food, drink, and electronics during the tournament, to off-site broadcasting centres, to the mountains of books, magazines, stickers, and other fan paraphernalia, to increased sales by energy behemoth tournament sponsors and advertisers, to enlarged non-official media and social media consumption, to massive increases in online betting, and so on. 

While these all should be incorporated into a full true cost accounting of the entirety of the tournament’s impacts, here I will simply add in a few emissions sources that obviously ought to be included.

An outdated starting point for assessing emissions

Predictably, the now seven-year-old environmental impact assessment from ARUP is the most up-to-date accounting of the World Cup’s anticipated impacts. In this document, they sensibly call for the creation of an ongoing carbon management plan and the formation of an environmental protection advisory group. 

However, a FIFA spokesperson could not confirm the existence of either entity and said that FIFA’s updated estimates of the tournament’s impacts would be unavailable until after its conclusion, so ARUP's assessment is the only data available, excluding this almost entirely content free “sustainability strategy” document. 

The most indisputable flaw in the assessment is that it is based on now-outdated assumptions. The 3.7 million tons estimate is based upon a tournament that was understandably imagined to last 32 days and include 80 games. As a result of FIFA’s decision to maximise the scope of their newly expanded 48-team tournament, the finals will now last for 39 days and have 104 games. 
If we adjust the estimate to include the additional 24 games, we are starting from 4.81 million tons of emissions.

Emissions will reflect the inflated footprints of the super-rich

Given the location FIFA chose for the tournament, most of the predicted emissions originate from international (51%) and domestic travel (34%), as fans fly to the continent and then travel between widely dispersed cities across North America. 

However, the emissions estimates per passenger are based on average passenger behaviour, and the nature of this World Cup is such that its attendees will be far from normal consumers. 

FIFA’s use of dynamic ticket pricing, inflated accommodation and airfare prices during the tournament, and the costly distances between events all conspire to ensure that this will be a festival restricted primarily to the global elite.

For instance, FIFA packages of tickets to see the first four games of any team at the tournament currently start at 6,750 US dollars, with eight match packages including the final costing 73,200 US dollars. Obviously, this is beyond the reach of most fans. 

But within this already affluent audience, FIFA requires that each stadium set aside between 3,025 and 9,300 particularly luxurious seats per game for “commercial affiliate hospitality,” VIPs, and VVIPs, and insist upon the provision of several thousand 4-5 star hotel rooms for these one-percenters.   

This socioeconomic group does not consume or emit anything like the rest of us, and they are, in fact, largely responsible for the climate emergency that imperils our collective future. 
As Oxfam reported in its briefing 'Extreme Carbon Inequality':

“Around 50 per cent of [global] emissions can be attributed to the richest 10 per cent of people around the world, who have average carbon footprints 11 times as high as the poorest half of the population, and 60 times as high as the poorest 10 per cent. The average footprint of the richest 1 per cent of people globally could be 175 times that of the poorest 10 per cent.” 

The impact of their extravagant lifestyles is quantifiable. In his book 'The Carbon Footprint of Everything', Mike Berners-Lee explains that a first-class airline ticket has four times the carbon footprint of an economy one, and a night in a luxury hotel room has 25 times that of an ordinary room. 

The exorbitant emissions of private jets

Perhaps the most repulsive symbol of this opulence is the private jet, which has roughly ten times the emissions of someone travelling on a first-class ticket, and is essentially the worst thing a human being can choose to do in terms of their deleterious impact on our planet’s ecosystem. 

Depending on the model, an hour flying in a private jet produces the same emissions as a global annual average person’s emissions of 4.5t C02. 

Leading from the front as always. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has travelled 600,000 km on a Qatari-owned private jet in the last three years. He will be amongst friends at the World Cup in this regard. 

A recent study in Nature on the growing environmental impacts generated by private aviation revealed that 1,846 private jets flew to Qatar for the 2022 World Cup, surpassing the total for the next four largest events (the WEF, Cannes, COP 28, and the Super Bowl) combined. 

This profligacy will be significantly increased in 2026, not only because the tournament will feature 16 more teams and 40 more games, but also because fans will not be flying to one tiny country with stadiums clustered tightly together, but to and across a vast continent with host cities several thousand kilometres apart. 

Again, using a lowball estimate (here utilising a bootstrapping statistical analysis to create average flight patterns), 2,400 private jet-setting fans travelling this way will spew an additional 101,500 tons of carbon, and 5,000 fans choosing to fly first class will add 81,000 tons. 

It is worth pausing here to remind ourselves that all of the emissions associated with a World Cup are, by definition, what Henry Shue calls luxury rather than subsistence emissions, as the tournament doesn’t need to happen at all. The lavish activity of the ultra-wealthy in this very public context is thus particularly obscene and dispiriting. 

As Andreas Malm argues in his book 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline', luxury emissions “represent the ideological spear of business-as-usual, not only maintaining but actively championing the most unsustainable kinds of consumption,” and they must be the first to be erased before we can ask struggling people to make sacrifices: “if we have to cut emissions now, that means we have to start with the rich.” We do.

Television and video may add another 40 million tons of emissions

Another anomaly in the environmental impact assessment is the inclusion of the nominal 4,626t of C02 emissions produced by on-site TV broadcasting centres, but not the gargantuan impact of those generated by the world’s consumption of the same content that is produced there. 

Watching football on television is a relatively low emissions activity, but when billions of people do it for several hours a day, many days of the congested schedule include 4-6 games per day, for 39 days, it adds up jarringly. 

These emissions are difficult to track, but we can extrapolate from the official figures for the previous tournament and adjust them for the greater scale of this event, generously assuming no increased global appetite for football in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

Given this, the World Cup finals will generate 121,171 hours (approximately 13 years) of licensed video content. This will correspond to 58,857,500,000 hours of linear global television consumption, which, using Berners-Lee’s estimate of 295.5g per hour, contributes a staggering 17.4 million tons of emissions.

The 4.8 billion hours of online video content consumption and live digital streaming will add a further 2.6 million tons. 

This is a low estimate, as it doesn’t include the massive and growing world of illegal streaming. At the 2018 Russia World Cup, online security experts identified 40,713 piracy links viewed by an audience of 41,317,139, primarily on social media. But the authorised consumption of World Cup content alone contributes roughly 20 million extra tons.

Tons of emissions from football shirts

In terms of merchandise, there is no clear reason why we should only include the 4,909 tons associated with official apparel bought through FIFA, but not the far greater volume associated with World Cup fan gear more broadly. 

Remarkably, as a major part of the fashion sector (the fourth largest source of pollution), the football apparel industry alone is estimated to produce 0.4 per cent of global carbon emissions, and this figure spikes around major tournaments. 

The 2022 tournament saw a 700 per cent increase in the sales of football shirts, and the market is growing quickly. The average football shirt generates 5.5 kg of CO2, and 60 per cent of them are thrown away annually. 

Actual sales figures are suspiciously hard to come by, so let’s very conservatively assume increased shirt sales of 250,000 per team - for context, top club teams can sell over 3 million shirts annually, and in 2018, Nigeria sold 3 million of its famously stylish shirts, as did Germany. That’s 12 million extra shirts, producing 66,000 additional tons of C02. 

However, this only includes replica shirts, not the even greater mountains of fan apparel that is consumed globally around the tournament, and also doesn’t include the illegal market for fake team shirts, which now accounts for one and a half shirts for each licensed one that is made, each with a worse environmental impact.

Emissions should also include qualifying matches

To recap, our running total for the finals is now 25,058,500 tons, or 240,947 tons per game.

But we need to account for another curious decision: why FIFA would only include the emissions associated with the 104 games in the finals and exclude those generated by the approximately 865 qualifying matches that are also obviously a part of the same tournament. 

It makes sense that the bidders for the World Cup 2026 would exclude these emissions, but FIFA is responsible for the tournament in its entirety, not just the finals. If we assign each of these matches only a fifth of the carbon impact (48,189 tons) of those at the World Cup finals due to a reduced average attendance, television audience, and so forth, this adds another 41,683,485 tons, raising the total to 66,741,985 tons.  

It is also true that until its abandonment in 2021, FIFA’s World Cup emissions estimates have always included those from the Confederations Cup held the summer before. 

As part of a broader pattern of emissions gigantism, this once minor warm up event involving 4-8 national teams, which served as a sort of dress rehearsal or stress test for the host nation, has been replaced with the rightly derided and unlovable Club World Cup, a considerably more energy intensive affair involving 32 club teams. 

If we follow the tradition of including the emissions linked with this event in the World Cup estimate and allot each of the 63 games only the same as a World Cup qualifying match, then the Club World Cup matches add another 3,035,907 tons. This leaves us with a grand total of 69,777,892 tons, more than 18 times greater than the preliminary estimate in the bid for the 2026 World Cup.  

The 1000-ton rule of premature deaths

The most famous quote about the uniquely obsessive nature of our love of football comes from legendary Liverpool FC manager Bill Shankly: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.” 

The football industry’s expansive and hypercapitalist disposition in the human-influenced geological age called the Anthropocene provides a grim opportunity to test Shankly’s hypothesis, as we can now roughly calculate the human casualties associated with the beautiful game in its ugly current incarnation. 

In the literature on the human impacts of the spiralling climate emergency and the “social costs of carbon,” the 1000-ton rule refers to the formula that, for every 1000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions released into the atmosphere, approximately one person will die prematurely.
 
This is a powerful psychological and political tool for making the consequences of our emissions less abstract. Rather than comparing events to the emissions produced by countries, which is a popular but seemingly unmotivating strategy, we can now actually assign a number of victims to our activities.

If we take FIFA’s own current emissions estimates for the 2026 finals, then their newly expanded tournament will kill 3,700 people. Including the emissions additions proposed above, a more plausible number is 69,777 people. 

The question then becomes: how many thousands, or tens of thousands, of our fellow humans are we willing to knowingly sacrifice in order to enjoy a certain kind of bloated and garish football tournament, one increasingly only accessible to the global elite? Is 69,777 corpses a price humanity is willing to pay to allow 6.5 million of the world’s wealthiest people to live, and emit, like kings for 39 days in the name of football?

69,777 is too many and could have been avoided had FIFA been driven by motives other than short-term self-enrichment. Given our catastrophic and ongoing failure to do so, convincing ourselves to reduce our global emissions seems to be a genuinely wicked problem of existential proportions. 

But reducing the emissions produced by a football tournament really isn’t difficult, even if the football industry appears committed to making exactly the most environmentally wrong choice at every opportunity. 

There is a place for football in the Anthropocene, but as I have argued elsewhere, this must begin with a sectoral commitment to degrowth, to reducing the scale and scope of these tournaments in favour of smaller, healthier competitions, featuring less but better football. 

Football’s governing bodies have insanely chosen precisely the opposite path, and are already contemplating a 64 team World Cup and a 48 team Club World Cup. For the world beyond the World Cup, this is the path of no tomorrow, and the consequences for humanity will be deadly. 

Many theorists have noted that our current language is inadequate to describe the uncanny new realities of an era of spiralling climate catastrophe. How can we characterise a global sporting organisation's decision to repeatedly choose expansionism, profiteering, and willful entanglement with the fossil fuel industries that are driving us to a sixth mass extinction, in total disregard of the human toll it will take? 

Given the relentless ecophobia and abject misanthropy that have defined FIFA’s decision-making during his tenure, we might consider the following grim neologism: Infantinocide.