Winning the (sustainability) league

As their club continues its march towards an unprecedented quadruple (winning the English Premier League, FA Cup, the Carabao Cup and Champions League), many Liverpool fans will likely be unaware that this could in fact be a quintuple - to reflect Liverpool's status as (joint, with Tottenham Hotspur) winners of the 2021 Green League. 

The Green League represents a joint effort by BBC Sport and the UN-backed Sports Positive Summit to rank Premier League teams based on 11 sustainability-related categories (including clean energy, waste management, low carbon food and water efficiency) and is an example of the increased recent focus on sustainability within sport (the league first being established in 2019). 

Interestingly, this year three new categories were introduced as part of the Green League scoring process: commitment & policy, biodiversity and education:

• The first of these is particularly relevant given the focus post-COP26 on setting targets (both for the long and medium term) and making plans for how to achieve those targets (known as transition plans). Four of the teams were awarded points for commitments to reduce emissions by 50% by 2030 and net zero by 2040, while Manchester City were also awarded points for their net zero by 2030 target. 
• The second, biodiversity, is also timely as it reflects the expansion of previously climate-dominated "E" limb of ESG seen elsewhere, notably in the progress being made on the development of the Task Force for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), sister to the Task Force for Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) which was introduced in 2017 and which has over the last year been incorporated into or used as a base for no fewer than 5 new regulatory regimes in the UK. 
• The final category reflects the comment made by the CEO of the Sport Positive Summit that "the power of sport within the climate crisis is the platform and influence it has to drive this change", a sentiment echoed in the comments of Liverpool CEO that "we're a relatively small organisation in terms of overall numbers of people, but we have an outsized impact in terms of the messaging that we can deliver on a global basis". 

When supporting your team, especially during a title run-in, it can be easy to forget that the clubs we love are, at the end of the day, businesses. Increasingly, it is being recognised that businesses have a responsibility to take action on and manage their sustainability risks, impacts and opportunities, particularly those related to climate change. 

Recognising that responsibility, the Premier League itself has signed up to the UN's Sport for Climate Action framework, which seeks to support and guide the sports sector in achieving global climate change goals. Premier League Chief Executive Richard Masters is said to have told BBC Sport that the Premier League is "continuing to work on [its] own strategy" on sustainability and is looking for "alternative methods and practices" to help "reduce emissions and environmental impact". 

The Green League represents a good first step in pushing clubs to do more, but one wonders whether the lure of a bonus point in the league itself (so invaluable in the context of recent title run-ins) would represent a better use of leverage by the Premier League and an improved incentive for member clubs than the Green League title. 

It would be a controversial, and unlikely, move but the reality is that whether as a result of stakeholder expectation, being caught by the increasing tide of regulation or indirectly impacted through investor pressure (and it should not be ignored that one of the supposed frontrunners for Chelsea is a private equity-led consortium) the sports sector needs to take action on sustainability and take action in as serious a way as Liverpool will the remaining weeks of the season.