The five levels of sustainability in European football: mapping the sustainability approaches of UEFA’s member national associations

ABSTRACT

With increasing interest being drawn to sustainability development in sport, and UEFA’s recent sustainability strategy being introduced as a roadmap and pressure level for football organisations’ sustainability efforts to intensify, the implementation of sustainability policy is becoming key for football’s sustainable development. In this study, through the lens of institutional theory and isomorphism, we focused on the under-studied recipients of said strategy, the UEFA’s member national associations (NAs), to capture the existing sustainability efforts within them, as they are reported on their official communications, and thus the backdrop to which the strategy was introduced and is being promoted. Qualitative document analysis was conducted on all official communications (website, national strategies, press releases) of all UEFA’s NAs. Through this, five levels of sustainability in European football were identified, capturing patterns in the existence of social and environmental sustainability actions and strategies among UEFA’s NAs. The five levels of sustainability in European football presented allow for a better understanding of the full spectrum of sustainability in football to be depicted, while acknowledging potentially overlooked nuances in the existence of not only actions but also strategies to guide organisations in their sustainability efforts, and illustrating the gradual progression from no sustainability to more sophisticated social and environmental sustainability in football.

KEYWORDS:

• Social sustainability
• environmental sustainability
• sustainability policy
• institutional theory
• document analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ioannis Konstantopoulos

Ioannis Konstantopoulos is currently an FNS researcher at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland and has worked in research roles at the University of Innsbruck and ETH Zurich. He is, also, a sustainability advisor at Innews, Founder of The Sports Footprint, a sustainability consultancy that has been awarded the Prince’s Trust International Global Sustainability Award for Europe, having a notable and diverse list of clients from the sports industry. Ioannis has also, developed several educational courses in sport and sustainability for organisations such as the Football Business Academy, the International Olympic Academy, the Athens University of Economics and Business, and the European Association for Sport Management (EASM). His research focuses on analysing the sustainability of major sports events and the application of new technologies in sports.

Argyro Elisavet Manoli

Argyro Elisavet Manoli is an Associate Professor of Marketing and Management in the University of Bergamo. Following a career as a marketeer in the sports industry, and having worked for English, Spanish and Greek football clubs, as well as international sport events and federations, Prof. Manoli begun her academic career in the UK, working for Loughborough University and Teesside University. Her research interests focus on two broad areas, marketing communications management and integrity management in the context of sport. Within these two themes, she has published extensively in highly esteemed journals, and has been awarded funding from prestigious institutions. Prof. Manoli was an academic expert on the European Commission Expert Group for Sport Integrity and is the author of the EU Report Mapping Corruption in EU Member States. Her research has been presented in the European Parliament and in numerous highly regarded academic conferences, as well as regularly cited in public policy. She is the Associate Editor and sits on the editorial board of a number of prestigious journals.