Bohs are well down the road of what might be termed mainstream green avenues. The club uses DHL’s green programme to ship their jerseys. They have talked sustainability with O’Neill’s. All of the vendors at Dalymount Park have moved to compostable packaging, and they work with Dublin City Council (DCC) on compostable waste and the like.
Children from schools in the nearby area designed environmental posters that have been put up on rubbish bins in the ground. And the club did a matchday audit for a home game with Shamrock Rovers last year that showed their average fan produces just 87 grams of waste when the Uefa norm is basically ten times that.
“We could improve on that 87 grams,” McCabe says, “but what’s the point?”
Eh, come again?
McCabe isn’t dismissing the importance of this stuff. The point is that it amounts to the lowest of hanging fruit, that clubs shouldn’t be applauded for doing any of it, and that it ultimately won’t make any meaningful dent on the wider climate and sustainability crises. Bohs, he explains, see things differently to the rest of the sports sustainability community.
“We are so far into the abyss here that a lot of the conversation really annoys me in sports sustainability because it is just rearranging the deckchairs. You can find any number of resources to see where we are going. One in particular, the [predicted] collapse of the Atlantic currents as early as this year is genuinely some of the most scary stuff you can read.”
So, what role does sport have in combating climate change then? “I would argue we fundamentally don’t.”
So far so confusing, right?
Sport can’t run from climate change any faster than other industries. Pitches and other infrastructure are at risk of rising sea levels and from fluctuating weather patterns. Athletes are being exposed to insufferable heat. Then there are the economic nuts and bolts that get corroded by the changes. Supply chains, transport, schedules, all of it.
Climate change means food shortages, mass migration and displacement. That leads in turn to civil unrest and instability, geopolitical fragmentation and, if society breaks down, then sport will be the last of anyone’s concerns. So, for McCabe and Bohs, it is social transformation that is the cornerstone of their climate change work.
“That’s what we see as our role here now, to walk the talk quite quickly.”
McCabe did some sums a while back and found that 175 clubs that had made up the now-defunct European Football for Development Network (EFDN) were contributing 6.1m tonnes of CO2 every year. Considerable but, at the same time, a drop in the ocean. Now consider that there are 290 million football fans in Europe with a footprint of 1.62bn tonnes.
Big difference.
“So this is where we change the dial. Not fan travel, or where you are getting your jerseys from. That’s important stuff but ultimately meaningless in terms of the scale of the emergency we are facing. … We are in a planetary emergency. How do we play to our strengths? What are our strengths? Our strengths are our fans.”
Social transformation is one of their three core beliefs. The second is that you have to take actions that are accessible and meaningful. Uefa made a sustainability ad last year with people shutting fridge doors and turning off lights. A stadium cheered every time a woman turned down a thermostat by a degree.
Great and all, but 30% of Irish people are living in energy poverty. Some are choosing between warmth and food in the winter months. So that’s one-third of the population alienated from Uefa’s message straight up. Bohs don’t see an awareness crisis: people know what’s happening. They see an affordability crisis.
Which takes us to the third core point.
This is explained with a picture of Buenos Aires streets heaving with millions of people after Argentina’s 2022 World Cup win. Transfer that communal bond into solutions for the climate crisis and you’re in business, and Bohs believe that, being 100% fan-owned, they can use football’s economies of scale to build community wealth through climate action.
“We think that if you can own a football club and compete against Dermot Desmond as a football community then you could own other tangible assets that could be beneficial for our community.
“There are three billion football fans in the world. Why in the name of Jaysus would we be looking at them and wondering, ‘how do we get them to use a bamboo toothbrush, or take a shorter shower and eat less hamburgers?’ It’s madness.” The key is in mobilising this collective, and it starts by addressing inequality.
Earlier this month, McCabe and members of the club board, staff, Dublin City Council (DCC) representatives, members of the Education and Training Board Ireland (ETBI) and local development partners, travelled to the Basque region in Spain to visit the Mondragon Corporation.
Set up in 1956 by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta, Mondragon is an enormous network of semi-autonomous businesses across finance, industry, retail and the knowledge sectors. Each one is owned and operated by its workers while, at the same time, part of a larger, mutually-beneficial association.
Mondragon has built up 81 separate cooperatives and employs 70,000 people. It generated a profit in 2023 of €593m with revenues that have pushed past €11bn and, because of its ownership model, the area has the lowest inequality in Europe. Bohs used their links with Athletic Bilbao to get in touch.
Another trip has just been undertaken to Cleveland, Ohio where the Evergreen Cooperative, set up in 2008 when the global recession hit, is operating under principles learned from Mondragon. Their umbrella group now boasts a laundry, a solar co-op and a green growers co-op among their operations.
This is the sort of space where Bohs sees themselves making an impact.
DCC has already adopted community wealth-building into their economic strategy for the capital city and Bohs want to be a part of that: part of a hub that supports businesses, provides central funding and takes back a small percentage of the money generated.
The environment and the community would benefit. And so would the club. “For the fan-owned model to continue to exist we have to get quite innovative about how we resource it,” says McCabe, “because the money [needed] in the League of Ireland is going up, it’s not going down, right?”
They have already dipped a toe in these waters with a free, eight-week Spark Skills programme teaching up to 150 members of the local community how to build solar circuits, fix bikes and learn about energy efficiency. Sheffield United have been handed the blueprint and plan to start their own version next year.
The Phibsboro club is currently working with Uefa, Solar Power Europe, KPMG and others on an application for European funding towards a project that, supported by a credit union, would put 500 units of free solar on their supporters’ homes with fans repaying through the savings generated.
Doing it at that sort of scale would bring down the terms of the loan, improve the efficiency of installation and create opportunities for employment. Bohs are also liaising with the ETBI, thanks to a grant from SSE Electricity, to put a green apprenticeship programme in place alongside their football academy.
Young players who don’t make it in football full-time — and that’s the vast majority of them — would pick up a lifetime skill that offers a career in a potentially lucrative industry that would serve the environment. So, there may be no points or trophies at play here, but the prize could hardly be greater.
“We have a very unique opportunity here to shift an entire mindset globally because the NFL come to visit us here,” says McCabe. “We’ve had football associations from Bulgaria, from Latvia, and football clubs from all over Europe. There is a genuine interest in what we are trying to do.”