Why The Carbon Footprint of the 2026 FIFA World Cup Could Be Double That of the Qatar World Cup
· Time
The 2026 FIFA World Cup is expected to be the biggest tournament in FIFA history—with 48 teams playing 104 matches in 16 cities across North America. Yet as FIFA moves to make the event bigger and better, according to a new report one thing may have been swept to the sidelines: sustainability.
An independent assessment published by the global carbon accounting platform Greenly estimates that the 2026 FIFA World Cup could generate 7.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—more than double the official reported emissions for the 2022 FIFA world cup in Qatar and equivalent to that of Sierra Leone.
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“The bigger an event, the more people attend, the more that fly to the different venues, the higher it emits,” says Alexis Normand, co-founder of Greenly. “That’s the reason the U.S., Mexico, and Canadian World Cup is going to be basically a record setter [emitter], because it'll have nearly three times more spectators than the previous World Cup, and they're going to be traveling across much larger distances.”
The Greenly team drew on publicly available data to predict the 2026 World Cup’s total greenhouse gas footprint—covering team flights, spectator travel, stadium operations, renovations, accommodation, logistics, and waste.
One of the emissions sources few people think about is spectator travel; 87% of emissions are expected to come not from stadiums or logistics, but from the spectators’ journeys. Though international fans will likely account for 35% of attendances, they are expected to generate 74% of travel-related emissions, Greenly’s research estimates.
Despite overall higher expected emissions, there are some categories in which the 2026 World Cup is expected to be less carbon intensive than 2022. While Qatar built seven entirely new stadiums, causing infrastructure to account for 24.6% of its total footprint, the 2026 tournament will use a number of existing venues, bringing that figure down to just 3.1%. U.S. hotels are also roughly six times less carbon-intensive than those in Qatar, which relied on continuous industrial air conditioning to combat desert heat.
The 2022 World Cup faced criticism for its carbon footprint, after falsely advertising the event as “carbon-neutral.” According to FIFA’s own calculations, which many watchdogs say are underestimated, emissions for those games reached 3.8 million metric tons—greater than the emissions generated by Iceland for the whole of that year.
In 2021, at the annual U.N. climate conference, COP26, FIFA committed to cutting emissions by 50% by 2030 and reaching carbon neutrality by 2040 under the U.N. Sports for Climate Action Framework. But while its sustainability strategy for 2026 covers energy efficiency, waste, and logistics, it does not set a carbon target for the tournament, and when it comes to spectator travel, it states it will: “Encourage relevant entities to set up efficient air travel routes that reduce distances.”. FIFA did not respond to TIME’s request for comment ahead of publication.
Global sporting competitions like the World Cup could, however, be the perfect chance for cities to make climate-forward investments that pay off even beyond the games—if they're willing to seize the opportunity. Paris, for example, used the 2024 Olympics as an excuse to update the city’s infrastructure—and reserved tickets for local residents to reduce the amount of out-of-town visitors.
“They used the event as an opportunity to decarbonize their own infrastructures, they renovated their railway networks, they renovated their stadiums to be less emissive, and use less energy,” Normand says.
It’s a model other cities and events organizers should look to follow, Greenly argues. “You have this huge spending surplus that results from essentially organizing a world-class event,” Normand says. “Use it as a Marshall Plan for upgrading your infrastructures for the future net-zero economy. But for that to happen, you actually have to think of the problem, which unfortunately hasn't happened.”