The 2026 FIFA World Cup is here. Forty-eight teams. Sixteen cities. Three countries. Three billion viewers expected. And according to independent researchers, the largest carbon footprint of any sporting event in history.

FIFA would like you to think otherwise. Its official sustainability strategy promises to “reduce environmental impacts, deliver best-practice solutions, and raise climate awareness.” So which is it: a genuine step forward or the most expensive greenwash in sport?

What FIFA is actually promising

To give credit where it’s due, FIFA’s sustainability plan has real content. Several host venues have made genuine investments: 

• Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium runs on renewable energy and hosts over 4,000 solar panels on site. 
• Seattle’s Lumen Field diverts between 90–95% of waste from landfill through composting and recycling programmes. 

FIFA has committed to biodiversity conservation requirements across host city areas affected by the tournament, and has embedded circular economy principles into temporary infrastructure planning (even though they have now even disallowed refillable water bottles inside stadiums!). At the venue level, this is among the more detailed environmental planning seen at a major tournament.

The problem that the sustainability plan doesn’t touch

Here’s what FIFA’s strategy does not address: the roughly 7.7 million tonnes of CO₂ projected from spectator air travel alone. A figure that could represent between 160% and 325% higher flight emissions than previous tournaments.

When researchers from Scientists for Global Responsibility calculated the total projected footprint of the 2026 edition, they arrived at more than 9 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent across the full tournament. That makes it, by a significant margin, the most climate-damaging World Cup in the event’s history.

The dominant driver isn’t the stadiums or the logistics, but the fact that millions of fans are flying enormous distances between cities that are themselves spread across three countries and thousands of kilometres. No, there is no Eurostar between Kansas City and Vancouver.

The structural contradiction at the heart of it

FIFA pledged in 2021 to halve its emissions by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2040. In the same period, it expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams and spread it across the widest geographic footprint in the event’s history. These two decisions are in direct conflict.

This is not a coincidence or an oversight. It is a structural tension that the current sustainability framework cannot resolve. A sustainability plan that addresses energy use and waste management at stadiums, but does not set a cap on total tournament emissions and does not directly address spectator travel, the largest source of impact by far.

The precedent here is not encouraging. In 2023, Switzerland’s advertising regulator ruled that FIFA’s claim that Qatar 2022 would be the first “fully carbon-neutral World Cup” was unsubstantiated. The first formal greenwashing ruling against a global sports organisation. FIFA’s own climate pledges were later found to be misaligned with the decisions being made about how to design the tournament.

What a credible approach would look like

The contrast most often cited by sustainability researchers is Paris 2024. The Summer Olympics was designed from the outset with a constrained footprint as a design requirement (compact geography, heavy use of existing venues, a host city accessible by rail from across Europe, and a genuine commitment to halving emissions versus previous Games). The result was not perfect, but the strategic logic was sound: the environmental constraint shaped the design decisions, not the other way around.

For a World Cup, this would mean asking hard questions at the bid and design stage:

• Can the tournament be hosted in a geographically compact region?
• Can host cities be chosen partly on the basis of low-carbon travel connectivity?
• Can the number of long-haul fans be reduced through ticketing structures or travel incentives?
• Can total tournament emissions be capped, not just measured?

None of those questions appear to have shaped the design of 2026. The result is a tournament with genuinely good operational sustainability practices grafted onto a fundamentally high-impact structure.

Why this matters beyond football

For sustainability professionals, the 2026 World Cup is a useful case study in a challenge that appears in organisations across every sector: the difference between operational sustainability and strategic sustainability.

Operational improvements such as renewable energy, waste reduction, and efficient logistics are necessary and worth pursuing. But they cannot compensate for strategic decisions that drive the majority of actual impact. A company can have best-in-class Scope 1 and 2 performance while its Scope 3 footprint ( the emissions embedded in supply chains, customer travel, or product use) grows unchecked.

The question FIFA’s critics are asking is not whether the recycling bins matter. Yes, they do. The question is whether an organisation can credibly claim to be addressing its environmental impact while the decisions that drive 87% of that impact, which in this case is how fans travel, remain entirely outside the sustainability framework.

Enjoy the football!