GARFIELD

Greenwashing Avoided through Reporting: a Football Initiative for Environmental Leaders to Deliver

GARFIELD will support transformational change towards sustainability reporting, to avoid greenwashing behaviours within the sport sector. Co-ordinated by the Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, in partnership with Aris Thessaloniki FC, FC Porto, Fundación Real Betis Balompie, TSG Hoffenheim and Sport Positive.

PARTNERS INFORMATION

Project partners will work to create transferable and scalable results and tools for football organisations and sports more generally.

These include the creation of:

A football materiality analysis tool, gathering input from stakeholders regarding concerns, expectations, and priorities related to sustainability issues.

An ESG indicators monitoring tool, to measure the performance of football organisations, through the lens of ESRS (European Sustainability Reporting Standards).

A greenwashing risk analysis tool and guidelines to correctly communicate the sustainability efforts and impacts in football.

The GARFIELD Project – co-funded by the European Union* – aims to support CSRD-compliant communication on three levels (international, national, and local) by focusing on the reporting and marketing activities of football organisations.

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, introduced in January 2023, strengthens the rules concerning the social and environmental information that companies have to report. By 2028, many organisations will need to comply with CSRD, including football organisations, depending on their size, activities, and the specific reporting thresholds and requirements outlined in the directive.

At this time, most National Football Associations and Clubs in Europe lack capabilities and tools for managing, monitoring, but above all, correctly communicate activities from an environmental perspective in a systematic way.

From these efforts, each football organization with the support of SSSA will define their own Environmental Improvement Plan.

Over the project’s 30-month duration, from January 2025 – August 2027, GARFIELD partners will share progress and learnings via dissemination moments including awareness-raising events, a mid-term report and conference, knowledge sharing via podcasts, social media, newsletters and videos and a final report and conference detailing the achievements, CSRD tools and greenwashing tools.