Plymouth Argyle among 14 clubs to sign Sustainable Travel Charter: Captain Joe Edwards on a club doing it differently | Football News

Plymouth Argyle’s players still have not returned home after their FA Cup tie against Manchester City on Saturday. The club’s commitment to make environmentally conscious travel choices means they are travelling on to play Hull on Tuesday evening.

Football-related travel generates 56.7 tonnes of CO2e per season for Premier League clubs alone, with 85 per cent of emissions attributed to flying. Plymouth are one of 14 clubs who have signed up to a new charter committing to greener behaviour.

“It does feel big,” Katie Cross, CEO of Pledgeball, tells Sky Sports. “We first launched this in 2023 with just six clubs, and the aim was to reduce the number of domestic fights happening within English football. We needed it to be a groundswell.”

Cross adds: “Having 14 clubs now, including a large number of Championship clubs, very happy to sign the charter, is a real reflection on the importance that is been given to sustainability, and particularly from individuals within those clubs.

“These are individuals who have personal appetite to really drive sustainability. Football business is very difficult. It doesn’t prioritise sustainability, it doesn’t really allow for it. So if you want to drive it, it has to generally come from a personal place.”

Plymouth, under chairman Simon Hallett, were always likely to be at the forefront of this initiative. Cross describes them as “an amazing club in terms of culture” with a revenue model that is very different to the norm – not every decision is a commercial one.

“It has been a bit of a journey for us over the last few years,” Christian Kent tells Sky Sports. Kent is Plymouth’s head of conferencing and events. “I am very proud of the progress we have made, we have pretty much halved our emissions in two years.”

He explains: “We are doing things like solar panels and rainwater harvesting, but then there are the small touches. We have gone digital with tickets. We use electric vehicles. Small steps can make a big change. We are working towards net zero.

“If you look at a sport like Formula 1, who are the biggest polluters in terms of the sporting world, they have made a big statement of being net zero by 2030. So if a sport like Formula 1 can do it, there is no reason why football cannot be the same.”

Why are Plymouth taking the lead on this? “Obviously, playing in green is really important to us,” jokes Kent. But it is about creating a culture, one that comes from the top of the organisation, from Hallett, chief executive Andrew Parkinson, and the rest.

“You need it from the board all the way down through to every member of staff. The whole team has to come together. Everyone here plays their part and lives those values. We want to be sustainable not just financially but in an environmental sense.”

Joe Edwards, Plymouth’s captain, is among those who have embraced the club’s values. Now 34, he joined six years ago from Walsall. He knows the location makes travel a hot topic. “It is a challenge but that is what makes it so special,” he argues.

“This is a unique club and it is fantastic to be involved in something like this. It comes from the top but it feeds through to us as players. We know we are affecting the carbon footprint so we want to take responsibility for that and play our part as well.”

Logistics mean that Plymouth do take flights, but they limit the number and try to be creative. “We do not need to be flying to every game,” says Edwards. Hence the decision to stay up north between fixtures, a serious commitment by the club given the hotel costs.

How do the players feel about being away for so long? “It varies. The ones with kids sometimes miss them. Sometimes it is quite nice to have a break!” Edwards has twin boys, five, and that has only sharpened the mind when it comes to the environment.

“They do get taught about it at school, which is great, I think. They come back with little things. When you have a young family that is growing up, you want to have the safest and the cleanest environment for them too. It has really highlighted the issue for me.

“When you sign here, you sign knowing the location. You are signing up for that. I have often quite enjoyed the logistics of getting to places because you have a lot of time together as a team. But I can imagine it is completely different at a Premier League club.”

Cross understands that better than most. She is reluctant to call out individual clubs but has heard the stories of flights for staggeringly short trips. “It’s an absolutely bizarre situation and a lot of fans call it out because it is such a visible thing,” she explains.

“You could say it is a small percentage of their overall emissions. But the normalisation of that behaviour is not measurable. It reinforces this feeling of paralysis and the kind of despair that people have because they feel that action cannot be being taken.

“We know from research that over 80 per cent of fans are concerned about climate change. They want their clubs to take more action but they are silent and so they are unaware of others’ concern. They are worried they will be laughed at for raising it.

“Players stepping up would have a huge impact. There is reticence from them because, of course, they are part of that system, not necessarily through choice. A lot of them don’t want to fly, but they are worried they will be called out for being hypocrites.

“William Troost-Ekong, the Nigeria captain, is very frank about the fact that he does not have a choice. He is within this carbon-intensive system, but he does what he can and the same should be true of all of us. It does not mean you just give up and just do nothing.

“We don’t need everybody to be perfect. What we really don’t need is a few being perfect, and the others too concerned about being perfect, they don’t take any action. It is about all of us doing really what we can in whatever role we see that as.

“Whether it is making sustainable choices in our own behaviour, talking to family and friends about it, talking to our club, talking to our businesses, voting with our feet when it comes to consumerism, people don’t realise how much of an impact we can have.”

The hope is that this charter can inspire meaningful change. Cross and Pledgeball have experienced “very little pushback” from clubs within the Football League but there is an appreciation that the riches of the Premier League bring with it different pressures.

Cutting out the flights would mean giving a competitive advantage to their rivals. But if the Football League clubs were to commit, there could bring a sea change in thinking. “We need that peer pressure, don’t we?” Supporters would start demanding better.

“Very quickly, it could become the new norm. Think of what happened with the smoking ban. It is absolutely bizarre now to think that we sit in a pub and people would smoke around us. But that is what used to happen. We accept the norm very, very easily.

“And here the norm is that, essentially, clubs are choosing to damage the air that we breathe quite significantly when it is absolutely not necessary to do so.” With clubs like Plymouth leading the way, the ambition is to show that there is another way.