Pledgeball Invites You To Join It In Driving Change At The FIFA Women’s World Cup

The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup kicks off Thursday at Eden Park in Auckland, New Zealand. The national teams from all 32 nations have settled in down under, with their final preparations under way for the largest women’s tournament to date. Players and fans are counting down the seconds until the action begins. But Pledgeball doesn’t want fans idle on the sideline, it wants them to be participatory members in soccer’s fight against climate change.

Just a week ago, it was announced that 44 of the players participating in this summer’s tournament organized the largest ever player-led campaign against climate change. This collective action involving players from three nations and two environmentally and socially-minded non-profit soccer organizations – Common Goal and Football For Future – is a strong signal of intent from the players on climate action. Pledgeball is now inviting the wider soccer community to demonstrate its collective power in driving down emissions.

In the words of founder Katie Cross, “Pledgeball is a charity started by fans, run by fans, that rallies fans to take a stand on environmental sustainability.” The research-backed organization is volunteer-driven and seeks to harness the collective power of the soccer community – which Cross describes as “unparalleled” due to the emotion and sense of belonging it generates – to drive change. But Pledgeball is just the tool – the fans are what make it work.

Using the pledges tab on the Pledgeball website fans of all countries and creeds can commit to simple climate actions that reduce their individual carbon emissions. Fans simply select the nation they are supporting, and the game they are making their pledge for and submit it. The pledge is then uploaded to the website, which tracks the overall reduction of CO2 emissions per game thanks to fan efforts.

But it doesn’t end there. Fans can also enjoy protecting where their teams play, which is why Pledgeball uses the match calendar to pit fans of different teams – in this case nations – against one another. The nation whose fans pledge to reduce the greatest amount of CO2 emissions wins the game and moves up the league table. Prizes are also up for grabs; everyone who pledges in support of a team is entered into a prize draw, and the more fixtures fans pledge in support of, the more times they are entered to win prizes. One of the grand prizes on offer is a BT-Sport t-shirt signed by their punditry team, which includes former professional soccer players Robbie Savage, Owen Hargreaves, Steve McManaman, Chris Sutton, “The Beast” Adebayo Akinfenwa and presenters Lindsey Hipgrave and Jules Breach.

Pledges can be as simple as reducing animal product consumption, taking a shorter shower, picking up litter off the street or switching to energy efficient lights. These pledges are not designed to change the world overnight, but to create new behaviors in a community with massive potential to drive change. As the charity’s science tab states, “small individual changes can snowball into massive wider societal change,” and that is Pledgeball’s end goal, to provide a platform through which soccer fans can help change the world for the better.

Bristol City FC fan Katie Cross founded Pledgeball after noticing her fellow soccer supporters’ adverse reactions to discussions about climate change. This spurred Katie to show fans what could be done about climate through the power of collective action. She started small, organizing a tournament for her local club in which everyone had to commit to a climate-related pledge. The response was positive and so she brought her idea to the 2020 Sport Positive Summit. By September of the same year her program was being piloted at non-league English club Whitehawk FC.

The whole idea of Pledgeball was based around the science of fan mobilization and collective action. Under the guidance of Professor Mark Doidge, then at the University of Brighton, master’s student Jennifer Amann studied Pledgeball’s pilot program at Whitehawk FC. She created a survey that went out to fans before and after the program ran and she did semi-structured interviews with fans about engagement with climate change, environmental activity and their clubs. The findings of Amann and Doidge’s study show that not only is a large proportion of fans aware of the severity of climate change, they could form a significant collective to engage with the problem. However, as individuals fans are paralyzed by the enormity of the problem, and feel like they have no agency or impact.

Doidge thinks the key to engaging fans is meeting them on their own terms. This means, buying into the culture of the sport they love, and understanding and connecting with the identity of their team and region. He says fans should not be lectured by governing bodies or clubs, and that if given a chance many fans are willing to bring solutions to the table. For him it is all about trust and authenticity.

Pledgeball has used this information to meet fans halfway. Instead of telling fans they need to change their actions and emphasizing individual commitment, the organization is making it simple for fans to create real change. Moreover, it is using the spirit of sports to create competition between fan groups. As their teams compete on the field, soccer fans can compete off it while helping the environment. This was seen best during last season’s Green Football Weekend in the U.K.

In its first year, the event – organized in part by Pledgeball – led to over 63,000 pledges and an emissions reduction of nearly 54,000 kg of CO2 (119,000 lbs of CO2) in one weekend. It also saw over 55 million impressions on social media and helped raise awareness of the sustainable actions fans can take to reduce emissions.

The charity is designed to generate a groundswell of collective action through regular engagement – every week during the season there is a league game to pledge for, and during the World Cup there will be 64 games in just 32 days – which over time generates new behaviors among fan groups.

Amann saw the creation of new behaviors by the end of her study. Below are the statements of two fans after the completion of the pilot program at Whitehawk FC:

“What I hadn’t realised is that change can be not a difficult thing. It can be something that is pure pleasure, that you want to do the new thing so much. Then you just love it.” (Interviewee 5, 62, F)

“I’m still doing all the stuff that I’ve pledged to do, so it’s not just pledging and doing it that one week or whatever. I have continued to do what I had pledged. It’s become part of the routine.” (Interviewee 11, 61, F)

The Women’s World Cup offers an even greater platform for fans to generate change than regular league play. According to Professor Doidge – who became a trustee of Pledgeball after helping Amann conduct her study – the tournament will help increase global recognition that women’s soccer is just as important as men’s, and the Pledgeball campaign will help generate positive environmental behaviors as the tournament progresses. He believes the intense nature of the tournament will allow fans to easily pledge in a repeated manner, since there will always be a game going.

Cross is hoping the tournament will create a buzz even amongst casual fans or the non-soccer community. When asked what she would tell fans whose country is not at the World Cup, or people who are not fans, but feel strongly about climate issues, she said they should pledge anyway. Cross insists people should not feel like they need to pledge for their national team; indeed they can commit to climate action because they feel strongly about a certain issue – like water availability, extreme heat or access to feminine products – or because they feel an affinity to a specific nation. She also encouraged people to find a personal connection by digging into the stories of the women competing and the struggles they have faced to get where they are.

Finally Cross notes, “The women’s game is amazing, the football, and the stories, and it offers opportunities that the men’s game doesn’t. I sincerely hope this is considered and harnessed as this brilliant game grows in its own right.”

With kickoff just two days away, fans can prepare themselves for a transformative tournament. As the players chase on-field glory fans will push environmental sustainability, knowing that their actions are helping Pledgeball achieve its two main objectives, “to collectively reduce emissions and take a stand on environmental sustainability,” and to support girls’ access to sports and education.

But it doesn’t end on August 20th. As the victors bask in celebration, fans will move on to the next competition, hopefully with a renewed desire to address sustainability. Fortunately, they can continue their climate pledges when the league season commences in their country because Pledgeball has the architecture in place to be used across the globe – all it needs are fans willing to make a difference.