World Cup feeling the heat but FIFA still taking oil money amid net zero claims | OneFootball

There is something almost too neat about the backdrop to FIFA’s latest climate headache.

England’s quarter-final win against Norway in Miami on Saturday kicked off with temperatures inside the stadium reaching 91°F (33°C) with a ‘feels like’ temperature of 113°F thanks to humidity.

Climate scientists told Reuters last week that the sweltering conditions affecting the tournament had been made more likely and intense by human-caused climate change, driven primarily by burning fossil fuels.

And yet there, around the pitches and throughout the tournament’s commercial ecosystem, are Aramco.

FIFA announced the Saudi oil company as a Major Worldwide Partner in April 2024, giving them sponsorship rights across the 2026 men’s World Cup and 2027 Women’s World Cup. FIFA described the deal as being built around a ‘shared commitment to innovation, development and creating impactful social initiatives’. Aramco remains FIFA’s exclusive partner in the energy category until the end of 2027.

The timing is awkward because FIFA also like to talk about saving the planet.

Their Climate Strategy, launched at COP26 in 2021, committed football’s governing body to cutting emissions by 50% by 2030 and reaching net zero by 2040. FIFA say they are committed to ‘taking climate action’ and making football infrastructure and operations more sustainable. The 2026 World Cup has its own Sustainability and Human Rights Strategy.

The problem is that, while FIFA talk green, they increasingly sell football to businesses whose products are inseparable from the climate crisis.

A new briefing, Promoting Polluters: The FIFA World Cup’s Bigger Climate Cost, published jointly by the New Weather Institute, Scientists for Global Responsibility, Cool Down and Fossil Free Football, attempts to put a number on that contradiction.

Its estimate is startling. Sponsorship agreements involving Aramco, Qatar Airways, American Airlines and Hyundai Motor Group could induce around 42 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent in additional emissions. Aramco alone accounts for an estimated 34.7 million tonnes, or 83% of the total.

For context, previous New Weather Institute and Scientists for Global Responsibility research estimated the 2026 World Cup itself would produce at least nine million tonnes of CO2e, with the figure potentially reaching 15 million tonnes when the greater warming impact of aviation is considered. Its basic estimate was already 92% higher than the average for the previous four men’s World Cups.

The new 42 million tonne figure is not a measurement of smoke pouring from a World Cup-branded chimney. It is an estimate of ‘sponsored emissions’. The methodology, developed in the New Weather Institute’s 2025 FIFA’s Climate Blind Spot report, uses estimated sponsorship values, expected commercial returns and each sponsor’s greenhouse gas emissions intensity.

The logic is straightforward. Businesses do not spend enormous sums on World Cup advertising as a charitable donation to the beautiful game; sponsorship is intended to maintain or increase sales. If the products being sold are oil, flights or cars, additional sales bring additional emissions. The researchers calculate the level of commercial activity required to generate a normal return on sponsorship spending, then estimate the associated climate impact.

It is a methodology based on assumptions and modelling, so the 42 million tonnes should not be presented as a directly observed emissions inventory. But it raises a question FIFA have largely avoided: should the climate impact of a tournament end at the stadium gates?

That question sits at the heart of the upcoming fourth episode of Route 26: Losing Sight of Goal, the five-part docuseries produced by Pledgeball and creators Laurence McKenna and Alex Moneypenny. And it is difficult to imagine a more appropriate World Cup for the conversation.

Fourteen of the 16 tournament stadiums now experience more extremely hot June and July days than they did in the 1970s, according to Climate Central. This tournament has been disrupted and threatened by heat, storms and lightning, while wildfire smoke has provided another visible reminder that football cannot simply schedule its way around a changing climate.

FIFA’s credibility on the subject was already damaged before 2026. In 2023, Switzerland’s Fair Advertising Commission found that FIFA had made false and misleading claims about the 2022 Qatar World Cup being carbon neutral, concluding that they had been unable to provide proof that those claims were accurate.

Now FIFA are promising net zero while providing the world’s largest oil company with one of football’s biggest advertising platforms.

Andrew Simms, director of the New Weather Institute, argues that dropping high-emission sponsorship deals could be “one of the greenest things FIFA could do”. Frank Huisingh, founder of Fossil Free Football, goes further, accusing petrostates of using football’s cultural reach to make fossil fuels appear inevitable and their pollution normal.

That is the uncomfortable point FIFA’s sustainability brochures cannot easily smooth away.

The 2026 World Cup has shown, in oppressive heat and violent weather, how exposed football already is to a warming planet. FIFA say they want to protect the game’s future. Yet every time the Aramco logo flashes beside the pitch, their commercial decisions tell a rather different story.

FIFA drew up a lofty climate target, but they keep taking money from businesses pulling the game in the opposite direction.