Join Green Action League and harness the power of sports fans to fight climate change

The impacts of climate change are being felt everywhere and the world of sports is no different. Soaring temperatures, floods and powerful storms are damaging facilities, impacting schedules and canceling games. But sports fans communities are active, passion-driven and uniquely suited to make a difference.

Right now, fans of Arsenal, the Denver Nuggets, Colorado Avalanche and Los Angeles Rams have a unique opportunity to create change while having fun and winning prizes along the way.

Led by fan mobilization platform Planet League and aluminum packaging manufacturer Ball Corporation, the Green Action League is the largest fan-driven sustainability campaign ever seen in sports.

Fans can start signing up today for the contest that runs November 11 through December 1! Sports fans can do their part to help the planet and win exclusive prizes such as game tickets, signed merchandise, and more! All they have to do is:

1. Register online today at their team’s specific site
2. Upload photos of them doing sustainable activities, like recycling, choosing aluminum packaging and taking public transportation
3. Keep it up through December 1 to help their team’s fans be crowned the ‘greenest’ fans!

Tom Gribbin, found of Planet League, joined spoke with FanSided about his organization, this new campaign and the importance of empowering sports fans to use their collective power for good.

FanSided: Can you give us a little more background on Planet League and how the whole project got started?

Gribbin: I've been working in the climate and sustainability space for quite a while but I sort of started out in the creative advertising world and then the marketing space. I had a good sense of how to connect with ordinary people and, you know, trying to engage them on whatever topic that may be. I started working for a very progressive NGO, looking at positive ways to look at leadership in climate change. And, long story short, that led to the formation of Planet League, which was about five years ago now.

And the simple premise is using the power of sport. That could be soccer in the UK, but obviously big US sports as well, and using those vehicles you have — through teams, through players, through the media, through fans. It's got this amazing kind of connection, locally, nationally, globally, everyone's got an opinion. And what we found with Planet League is you can talk about greener living in really kind of simple ways, where you meet fans where they are. And amazingly, it translates into fans not only taking action in a sustainable way around the match day and the match day experience, but it gets into the home. So it gets into people reducing their energy bills, wasting less food, recycling more and all sorts of other stuff. It's a really exciting way to talk to people about living greener, but, but not in a sort of preachy or classic sort of NGO campaign way.

FanSided: From your perspective, what makes sports such an appealing way to work on some of these issues and connect with people?

Gribbin: Billions of people all over the planet are into a sport. It's a form of entertainment. It's a form of escapism from our day-to-day lives. And we look forward to the next match, we look forward to the playoffs or whatever may be coming up.

I think when you're looking at a topic like climate change and sustainability, it's not enough to look at just attitudes. If you look at other important social causes around race, gender or equality, and a lot of that is attitude stuff. It's sort of saying to people, you know you're not behaving in the right way. In climate. It's not as simple as that. We can't just get people to say this is important. The changes we need in society are huge, and so Planet League is all about people taking action themselves in their day-to-day lives, rather than writing to their congressman or, you know, going to a march or rally.

It's about taking some personal responsibility, but doing that alongside your fellow fans, or doing that with a team of fans to try and beat another team. So we bring in the competitiveness of Planet League and that's really exciting, because, as you'll know, when rival teams go head to head, fans will do everything they can to help their team win.

FanSided: I live in the US. My knowledge of the sports fan communities and sports fan experiences are focused here. And there's often a refrain from some fans about keeping politics out of sports and there's a large segment of the fan community that wants their sports without anything else. Have you encountered that in the UK, and how do you deal with that issue of sort of helping people recognize that climate change is not separate from sports?

Gribbin: We're seeing some quite devastating examples of how climate change is impacting sport right now. If you're into soccer and you know Valencia in Spain, you know, there's been huge flash floods, completely wiping out cities and football has completely stopped. In South America. There was some awful flooding quite recently as well, stopping games from being played.

So again, number one, if you're a sports fan, the worst thing that could happen is that your games don't happen because of climate change. Obviously sports like basketball have indoor arenas but once you have roads flooding, or young people at the grassroots level not being able to play because, the turf is all cut up, or pitches are completely flooded. I think there is a direct impact that climate does have on a sports fan experience.

On that broader level around the political side of things, you know, you're right. We use sport primarily as a way to escape all the other things going on in our lives, and it's there for, hopefully, enjoyment, when our teams win. We come back each week. What we're very mindful of in the sort of tournaments we do with teams is that we're putting kind of ideas in front of fans, where we're kind of meeting them where they are. So we're not saying to a fan, "Hey, give up meat and neber drive your car again and never get on a plane."

If you say that to a sports fan, you're probably going to get some sort of gesture.

So you know, to score a point in the Green Action league for one of those teams, you choose an aluminum can rather than a plastic bottle, or you recycle at home, or you switch your lights off, or you, you know, you might walk to the shops rather than get in the car. So these are really small, simple steps and what you find is that it's actually part of your everyday routine already. You know, when you're going out, take your reusable water bottle or your reusable cup with you — you score points for doing that. You upload a photo to the platform and we check it, and that's how you score for your team.

A lot of those are at home but, with a lot of those teams in the Green Action League, they're around the event itself. So if you're at SoFi [Stadium], you recycle when you're at SoFi, or you're at the Ball arena, and you use Ball's recycling machine. Or if you take public transport to the Arsenal game at the Emirates, again, you will score. So we're kind of trying to bring it into the game, but at the end of the day, once you get there, enjoy the match. We're definitely never going to interfere with that.

I think the other bit that's really important here is that the teams are backing it a lot. So we've been working with players and with the Denver Nuggets, we work with DeAndre Jordan. And what you find with DeAndre is he's hugely passionate about this topic. He's a vegan himself for many different reasons, but he's incredibly into sustainability. And you probably wouldn't know that from, you know, just being a Nuggets fan. And if you're a fan of any team, you you love to hear sort of those player journeys and stories. So that's what part of this is about, using the athletes as a way to talk about things people can do in an authentic way.

FanSided: How hard is it to find overlapping areas of interest? Specifically the the Green Action League, with the Kroenke Sports Group and Ball, to find these areas where, fan activism, team involvement and corporate interest all align neatly, because that's, that's kind of the superpower, right, if you can sort of get all three of those groups working together?

Gribbin: It is the superpower! And trust me, it's it's not easy. It's taken five years to get to this point. A lot of the work we've done, in communities, with schools, with disadvantaged groups, and that's wonderful. And everyone goes, "hey, that's a great community thing. But there's no funding for that."

You do a one-off thing for a few weeks, and it's difficult. You need to work with a corporate brand, a sponsor. And you need the teams on board because that gives you access, ultimately, to the fans. So this partnership has been fantastic because we sort of piloted it, I guess, last season with Arsenal and Ball Corporation and it went so well that we, we spoke to Ball in the summer, and I said, "Look, we know this works well in the UK, why don't we bring it and see if it works in the US?"

Obviously these are three different sports, yeah. But you know, ultimately, a sports fan is a sports fan, whether you're into ice hockey or basketball or soccer. So we're delighted with how it's gone in, you know, we're kind of just starting the fourth day of the campaign. I think we're on over 30,000 points scored. The Avalanche fans are ripping it up right now, and they're, you know, they're top of the leaderboard.

FanSided: Unless I missed something, this is the first foray into the US, the first campaign that's directly in the US?

Gribbin: Yes, directly in the US. With Arsenal, the campaign we did last season reached 164 different countries because they're a global fan base. So we've had people from all over the world participate, but in terms of teams and talent, yes, this is the first time we've we've worked in the US.

FanSided: How much motivation is there to stretch this beyond the UK and to look at leagues and teams and other places? I know KSE is sort of a perfect animal, because they are one corporation holding teams in multiple countries.

Gribbin: I mean, I spend a lot of time in the US, and you guys are crazy about sports. You've got lots of sports as well. I think the difference in the UK is, sort of soccer is so big, that's where we started. And we started with not only Premier League clubs, but sort of teams in the in the fourth tier as well, so some really small local clubs. And again, it works there, but what you don't have is it doesn't scale.

So look, I'd love to do more in the US with this but we have to see how this plays out so far. With the three US teams, this is the first time they're on that journey. And one bit of detail, I think is important is, again, we're not just saying, "Hey, put some flyers and posters up asking people to recycle and hey, you've done your job."

It's far more immersive in terms of the player content, the prizes and going to a platform and signing up and doing stuff. So you know, those organizations are taking that journey for the first time. And I think what I'm starting to see is they're really embracing this one. But I think the exciting thing about this is you can prove that sport really does have the ability to get into households. And I think what's great about working with Ball in this is, you know, they're a business built around sustainability. You know, the aluminum packaging is infinitely recyclable. I think something like 70 percent of it is still in use today. And when you start to think about the choices we make, it's great to have a partner who is kind of all in on sustainability. So you've really got a credible, you know, organization who are backing this and help making it happen.

So, yeah, we're, we're certainly starting to see more and more of this. And, you know, ultimately, in any organization, it needs to move up. The more that, you know, KSE or the NFL or an MLS or a Premier League, look at this and go, "Hey, actually, we've got the ability here to reach hundreds of millions of people." Then maybe we have the right mechanical campaign to talk about this

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

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