From turf to table: The growing push for more sustainable food at football

It’s a familiar matchday scene: the crisp rustle of a paper tray, the comforting warmth of a meat pie and the soft clink of a plastic cup, brimming with something cold and fizzy.

But across a few pioneering grounds, that ritual is undergoing a quiet revolution. Football is a place of tradition, but as environmental urgency tilts the playing field, stadium food is becoming an unlikely frontline in the fight for sustainability.

Perhaps no club embodies that shift more fully than Forest Green Rovers. Under the stewardship of green-energy champion Dale Vince, the Gloucestershire side transformed into the world’s first fully vegan professional football club in 2015, a move recognised by the United Nations as making them the first carbon-neutral football club.

Their New Lawn ground isn’t just vegan; it’s a case study in green infrastructure. The pitch is organic and pesticide-free, watered by recycled rainwater. A solar-powered ‘MowBot’ trims the grass, solar panels produce up to a quarter of the stadium’s energy and cooking oil is turned into biofuel. This shift hasn’t dampened demand. In fact, Forest Green’s owner recalls that “crowds quadrupled in size and our food sales went up ten-fold” after going vegan, suggesting that sustainable food and appetites can thrive together.

Down in London, Tottenham Hotspur are less radical in menu but arguably more scalable. Spurs have adopted what they call a ‘plant-forward’ strategy. Meat remains on offer, but dishes are rebalanced to include vegetables, grains and legumes to lower carbon emissions. Their 50:50 ‘N17 Burger’ blends beef with mushrooms, and independent lifecycle studies suggest such swaps can cut per-burger emissions by roughly 30 to 50 per cent, depending on assumptions.

In a pilot that could reset expectations, Spurs have introduced carbon labelling on menus – marking dishes with A or B carbon intensity ratings, based on cradle-to-grave analysis – to guide choices across retail and premium dining zones. They’ve even hosted a ‘Sustainable Menu Competition’, where diverse staff teams crafted dishes judged not just on flavour, but on carbon footprint and waste reduction, with the winners featured on premium event menus.

In Germany, football stadiums are showing that progress can be built into regulation and then amplified by tradition. Since 1 January 2023, an amendment to the German Packaging Act mandates that venues offering takeaway beverages must also provide reusable containers at the same price as their disposable counterparts.

This law applies even in sporting arenas, extending to even the fourth tier of the football pyramid. Food containers, however, are exempt if they’re made of pure cardboard, wood or aluminium – allowing venues to continue using only sustainable disposables.

Environmental advocacy group Deutsche Umwelthilfe tracked club compliance and found that, at the 2023 season’s kick-off, 17 of the 18 Bundesliga clubs had already adopted reusable cup schemes – Schalke 04 being the lone holdout (and now also compliant). This dramatic shift marks Germany as a pioneer in European football sustainability, with the Environment Minister even saying the league “plays a pioneering role internationally in the area of sustainability”.

Some clubs had already been leading the charge long before the law came into force. SC Freiburg – celebrated in environmental circles – installed one of the largest photovoltaic systems on a soccer stadium roof. Since 2022, more than 6,000 solar panels have produced around 2.3 million kilowatt-hours annually across a 15,000 square-metre roof area at the Europa-Park Stadion. That’s enough to cover the stadium’s annual electricity needs in a climate-neutral manner. The installation has undergone independent inspection and certification by VDE Renewables, earning their seal of quality.

Beyond Freiburg, St. Pauli and Werder Bremen are also longstanding sustainability pioneers.

St. Pauli, known for their left-wing fan base, selects partners based on ecological and social criteria. And Werder shine in their sustainable mobility initiatives, boasting excellent public transport connections and thousands of bicycle parking spaces to discourage car use on matchdays.

These innovations are as much cultural as they are operational. Fans may grumble about traded-in rituals – “where’s our meat pie?” – but change is rarely swift. Still, at Forest Green, a meat-loving fan admitted their vegan pie was “probably better, quality-wise”, even if he’d “prefer something not mimicking meat”. That’s a start.

There’s something symbolic about swapping pies and pints for plant-based fare. Football clubs sit at the centre of fan culture. By embedding sustainability in matchday menus, clubs send ripples through loyalties. If tens of thousands of match-goers normalise eating sustainable food, that cultural shift outlasts any single game.

Yet we must be wary of easy narratives. A vegan pie is not the same as ending private jet tours or reversing broadcast emissions. The optics of a compostable tray beside fuel-guzzling team charters makes food progress seem modest in context.

But progress, even pie-sized, matters – especially when it links carbon awareness to everyday occasions.

Imagine the matchday of 2035: fans tucking into locally-sourced, plant-forward meals on biodegradable trays, perhaps armed with carbon labels guiding their choices – content that their small change adds up. And they probably won’t even notice, because the football will still feel familiar – comforting, communal, and undeniably theirs.

Football food isn’t just nourishment. It’s ritual and identity. And as the game edges toward greener pastures, what we eat and how it’s served might just lead the way.

To learn more about Pledgeball and how you can pledge to help your club shoot up the sustainability standings, visit Pledgeball.org.