For all the negativity that surrounds modern football culture, Forest Green Rovers are showing us all how to make the beautiful game a sustainable one, too.

Ambition. Every football club in the world states how ambitious they are. Owners promise new signings, hire new managers and build grand stadiums hoping that their ambition will lead them to glory. 

Invariably, this means football clubs are spending more and more in the pursuit of creating success last seen in their increasingly faded history. 

Trying to outspend the competition to recreate the past is not the challenger way, though. Forest Green Rovers has a different kind of ambition. Whilst on-pitch success is one aim, the club is executing an environmentally sustainable strategy that makes it the most future-oriented football club in the world. 

So why is a team playing in the fourth tier of English football a Challenger to Watch in 2022?

Founded in 1889, Forest Green Rovers are based in a slightly unremarkable town called Nailsworth in Gloucestershire, with a population of just 6,000.

Since entrepreneur Dale Vince took over the club in 2010, he has transformed the club’s fortunes, winning promotion to the Football League in 2017 for the first time, after over a century playing at obscure local and regional levels.

Whilst Vince wants to see the club reach the Championship (two leagues above where they are now) in the next few years, it’s how Rovers are changing perceptions towards environmental issues that has the football world looking at a tiny town in Gloucestershire.

Forest Green Rovers is the first-ever carbon-neutral football club, as certified by the UN, and FIFA has named them as ‘the world’s greenest football club’. Vince didn’t have a background in football, not usually a recipe for on-pitch success as an owner, but perhaps it’s this outsider status that’s enabled him to implement several fundamental changes to the club.

So what makes Forest Green Rovers so green?

For a start, Rovers is not owned by an oil-rich state looking to change public perception by affiliation with a football club. Instead, the club is owned by an eco-entrepreneur, Vince is the founder of Ecotricity, a renewable energy company.

Rovers play in football kits made from recycled coffee beans, and electricity generated by the solar panels on the stadium roof powers the stadium. Even the pitch is eco – it is 100% organic, irrigated by rainwater collected from the roof, and mowed by a robotic lawnmower powered by solar. In addition, local farmers reuse the grass cuttings to improve the condition of their soil. 

Perhaps most remarkably, Rover is a fully vegan football club. All meals served to staff, players, and fans are plant-based. Getting die-hard football fans to go meat-free was initially seen with some scepticism, but the club reports that efforts have encouraged many of their fans to go vegan and the overall ethos has led to many supporters now considering purchasing electric cars.

What next?

The club has finally had the approval to build a modern all-timber stadium, designed by architect Zaha Hadid, that will allow Rovers to expand capacity if and when it’s needed. A further symbol of the club’s ambitious mindset towards sustainability. 

Rover’s beliefs and values are also attracting a new breed of sponsors to the game – would the likes of Oatly, Innocent and Sheese usually sponsor a football club in the fourth tier of British football? Probably not. And demonstrating that alignment with these values isn’t coming at a cost to sponsors is likely to encourage other clubs to follow suit.

Forest Green Rovers is forging a path in football that few thought possible. In the near future, the team will travel in electric vehicles to an all-wood stadium, playing in kits made from recycled coffee grounds where they will be greeted by fans satisfying their match-day hunger with plant-based burgers and pies and carbon neutral beer.

The world’s biggest clubs are now playing catch up.

Ben Cooper is a Strategy Director at eatbigfish.