British footballers tell FIFA: the heat is killing our game
UK players have signed a letter demanding FIFA protect them from dangerous heat at the World Cup, but football bosses keep taking polluters' cash
Picture the World Cup. The beautiful game on the biggest stage. Billions watching. And players collapsing in heat that human beings were never meant to work in.
That’s not scaremongering. That’s the warning now coming from professional footballers themselves.
Open letter to FIFA
More than 60 players from around the world have signed an open letter to FIFA demanding urgent action on heat stress ahead of this summer’s tournament in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Among them are dozens of British players from across the football pyramid, including Chuba Akpom of Ipswich Town, Jordan Rhodes, who earned 15 caps for Scotland, former Norwich City and Wycombe manager Russell Martin, and players from clubs including Oxford United, Derby County, Stevenage, Colchester United and many more.
These aren’t fringe voices. These are people who have spent their lives on pitches, in training grounds, in the heat.
And they know what it does to you.
Impact of heat
“It can make you feel light-headed, dizzy, experience fatigue, muscle cramps and worse,” the letter states. “You can run less and it becomes impossible to play with the same intensity as with more average temperatures.”
Think about that the next time you watch a World Cup final. Those aren’t peak athletes underperforming. Those are human beings being asked to compete in conditions that are increasingly dangerous, on a planet that is getting hotter year by year.
The players are backing a call from medical experts for FIFA to update its heat-stress protocols before the tournament kicks off. That’s the minimum. A basic duty of care. You’d expect it for workers in any other field. Why should footballers be any different?
Stop taking money from polluters
But the letter goes further. Because the players understand something that the executives in their air-conditioned boardrooms apparently don’t: you cannot tackle the symptoms while you’re funding the cause.
The signatories call on FIFA to drop its fossil fuel sponsors. Full stop. The polluters who have pumped filth into our air for decades, who have lobbied governments to delay action, who have raked in record profits while ordinary people sweat and suffer. FIFA is taking their money. And that makes football part of the problem.
“It would be a missed opportunity,” the players write, “if a sport so impacted by the climate crisis doesn’t take its responsibility in addressing it.”
They’re right. Football has form on this. The game has taken stands on racism, on gender equality, on inclusion. Those fights weren’t easy. But they were right. This one is too.
A lighter environmental footprint
The players also call for a smaller, more regional football calendar. Less burden on players already stretched to breaking point by an overcrowded schedule. And, they point out, it would also reduce the sport’s impact on the environment. What’s good for the players is good for the planet.
British footballers are putting their names to this. Ordinary professionals from League One, League Two, non-league. Not just the superstars. Real people who love the game and want it to survive and flourish.
The question is whether FIFA and its backers in the fossil fuel industry will listen. Or whether they’ll carry on counting their money while the pitch gets hotter.
We all love football. We all want to see it thrive. But we can’t keep looking the other way while the people who run it take cash from the very polluters making our world less safe, less healthy, less fair.
It’s time FIFA picked a side.