Football Fever
15-06-10
What better way to bond with your EUR colleagues than to watch the Dutch team win its opening match in South Africa. On 14 June from 13.30 until 15.15, university life (as we know it) seemed to stop.
I don’t know about you, but I came into work that Monday especially to watch the game. Wearing orange and filled with nerves, many of us gathered in boardrooms, or lecture halls (e.g. T3-05), or better yet sitting outside In de Smitse watching with a drink in hand in the sun. Watching football is a collective and egalitarian activity. Cleaners mixed with students and with management team members, all of us squeezed together with a common intent. Fabulous.
During the match, a professor said to me, “I think the whole Dutch economy has stopped to watch!” And why not? It isn’t often that the World Cup happens. And who wants to make a tough business decision when you know that there is still no goal after 30 minutes? (But take heart, the economy of pubs and cafes must have picked up the slack).
Aside from being an avid football fan myself (and I confess to an emotional tie to the English side), I know that football is increasingly concerned with being green. The Dutch team are wearing uniforms made of recycled plastic bottles by Nike, along with Brazil and Portugal.
In advance of the tournament, the South African Department of Environmental Affairs and Tourism estimated the carbon footprint of the 2010 world cup to be 2.8 million tonnes of CO2e (that’s all greenhouse gases combined into a CO2 equivalent figure). The study was conducted with the Norwegian embassy in South Africa and estimated the direct footprint from travel and accommodation of players and those they travel with, the construction of buildings, the energy used at stadiums and fans travelling. That breaks down to 230g of CO2e per fan-hour.
This number doesn’t include the energy we emit by watching TV. But that’s an easy part to tackle: the best way to reduce our footprint is to watch it together in a big Public Viewing on EUR campus: we don’t need all these little rooms with people watching separately. Let’s erect an outdoor cinema screen and all watch the World Cup together: a great way to reduce our footprint and increase our sense of community.
