As fans around the world tune into the World Cup, the tournament’s most prominent advertising hoardings carry the logo of Aramco, the Saudi Arabian oil giant that is also the single largest corporate polluter on the planet. The company’s designation as the “energy partner” of Fifa has reignited anger over the sport’s deepening entanglement with the fossil fuel industry, and with a country that has for decades acted as the main obstacle to international action on climate change.
From factory floors to football pitches
The link between football and the industries that power the global economy is not new. It stretches back to the game’s modern origins in Victorian Britain, where it was used as a tool to instil order and discipline among industrial workers. The Factory Act of 1850 gave workers the right to Saturday afternoons off from 2pm — the reason why the traditional kick-off time remains 3pm. Industrialisation, militarism and colonialism then exported the sport across the world, from the mills of north-east England to the industrial regions of France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil.
In the postwar era, professional football became dominated by clubs based in industrial cities, many of them tied directly to heavy manufacturing. The most visible examples were Juventus, backed by the Fiat car company, and Wolfsburg, owned by Volkswagen. At that time, the economic rules of elite men’s football kept the game far more evenly spread: nine European Cup winners came from nine different cities in the 1990s, and finals were sometimes contested by sides from smaller cities such as Malmö.
That relative equality did not last. The biggest clubs began pushing for structural changes, culminating in the creation of the Premier League and the rebranded Champions League in the early 1990s. The game became increasingly globalised — and opened the door to a new kind of investor.
Petrodollars and the new elite
Today, there is only one route for a club to break into the highest tier of European men’s football: investment from a petrostate. Since the late 1990s, the Champions League has been won by just three clubs that were not among the 14 elite sides that originally pushed for its expansion. All three — Chelsea, Manchester City and Paris Saint-Germain — entered the elite with the help of petrodollar money. Chelsea was bought by the Russian oil magnate Roman Abramovich, Manchester City by Sheikh Mansour of the United Arab Emirates royal family, and Paris Saint-Germain by Qatar Sports Investments, a subsidiary of the Qatari government. For clubs that fail to secure such backing, bankruptcy has become far more common.
This pattern has locked fossil fuels into the fabric of the sport. According to Oscar Bergland, a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol and co-author of a report on football and climate change, the dominance of fossil capital is now so embedded that it is hard to imagine elite football without it. “There is now only one way for a club to enter the elite level of men’s football in Europe and that is investment from a petrostate, further locking in the carbon intensity of the sport and embedding fossil fuels as a crucial part of the biggest culture in the world,” Bergland writes.
The scale of Aramco’s own involvement is staggering. In April 2024, the company signed a four-year global partnership with Fifa to become a “Major Worldwide Partner” in the energy category, covering the 2026 World Cup and the 2027 Women’s World Cup. The deal is understood to be worth around $100m (£79m) a year, with a total estimated value of $400m for the 2026 tournament alone. Aramco, which is 98.5% owned by the Saudi government, has been responsible for more than 4% of all global carbon emissions between 1965 and 2017, according to one analysis. It continues to invest tens of billions of dollars in expanding oil and gas production, and its chief executive has publicly argued that phasing out fossil fuels is unnecessary.
Sportswashing and the fight for legitimacy
The growing presence of petrostates in football is part of a wider strategy known as sportswashing — the use of sport to improve the reputation of sponsors or hosts with controversial records, and to distract from negative actions. Historical examples include Nazi Germany’s 1936 Olympics and South Africa’s use of rugby to normalise apartheid during the 1980s and 1990s. More recently, Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup drew widespread criticism over the country’s human rights record and the tournament’s environmental impact.
Saudi Arabia, for its part, has been described as the greatest stumbling block in international climate negotiations. The country has repeatedly opposed references to the 1.5°C warming limit and language on phasing out fossil fuels. At last year’s COP29 summit, according to reports, it sought to undermine the transition pledge agreed at COP28. The kingdom has used tactics such as disputing agendas, claiming talks lack a mandate, and linking adaptation aid to compensation for lost oil sales. It has also historically blocked the use of voting in UN climate talks, insisting on consensus — a rule that gives disproportionate influence to countries resistant to change. This obstructionism is driven by the country’s heavy reliance on oil revenues, which fund its sovereign wealth fund and domestic social order. A green transition is seen as an existential threat to the Saudi regime.
Fifa’s own relationship with fossil fuels has been increasingly questioned. The 2022 World Cup in Qatar generated an estimated 3.8m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, with independent watchdogs saying Fifa’s own estimates were “massively understated”. The upcoming 2026 tournament, which will be co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico across three continents, is projected to be the most polluting ever, with total emissions potentially reaching around 9m tonnes of CO2 equivalent — nearly double the historical average. Air travel alone is expected to account for 7.7m tonnes of that carbon budget. Transport was already the largest source of emissions at the 2022 tournament, accounting for 56.7% of the total — higher than the entire carbon footprint of the Paris 2024 Olympics.
Fifa has claimed carbon neutrality for recent tournaments, but its offset initiatives have been deemed “not credible” by critics. For the 2034 tournament, which will be hosted by Saudi Arabia, plans include building 11 new stadiums, one of them in the still-unbuilt NEOM megacity. The use of air conditioning in Qatari stadiums relied heavily on non-renewable energy. Meanwhile, the 2026 World Cup is forecast to be the hottest since the tournament began in 1930. Research from Climate Central shows that 97 of the 104 matches are likely to experience temperatures above 28°C, a threshold that can impair players’ speed, endurance and strategy. Two first-round matches — Saudi Arabia v Uruguay in Miami, and Sweden v Tunisia in Monterrey — were played at wet-bulb temperatures of 28°C or higher, a level at which the global players’ union Fifpro has argued games should be delayed or postponed. Fifa has introduced cooling breaks for temperatures of 32°C and above, and shifted some kick-off times, but delays remain at the discretion of organisers. Heat and public health experts have urged Fifa to adopt stronger protections.
Behind the sponsorship deals, the club takeovers and the tournament branding lies a deeper purpose, according to Bergland. Fossil fuel companies, he argues, need their products to be seen as a “necessary evil” — so embedded in everyday life that people cannot imagine a world without them. “For every petrostate or oil magnate that buys a football club, for every event or club sponsored by a fossil-fuel company and for every airline logo on the shirt of our favourite players, the dominance of fossil capital becomes that little bit more embedded and makes it harder to imagine the game, and the world, without it.” As fans love the beautiful game, he says, they are led to accept fossil capital as essential to keep it alive. “Aramco has bought into the World Cup in order to sell us the idea that we have no choice but to continue to burn fossil fuels. Don’t buy it.”
