When the whistle blows, who counts the carbon?

What the 2026 World Cup tells us about the difference between promising to be green and proving it.

The controversies around the 2026 World Cup are still ongoing but one has yet to be mentioned. The tournament’s carbon footprint, which so far has not and may never be confirmed.

When the United States, Canada and Mexico bid to host, their pitch included a climate promise: a carbon-neutral event. The bid’s own environmental assessment, a 97-page report by the consultancy Arup, estimated a footprint of around 3.7 million tonnes of CO₂e across the tournament. By the time the event actually arrived, spread across a whole continent, it was far larger than that bid had described. And FIFA itself set no carbon-neutral target for 2026 at all.

So when researchers wanted to know the real number, they could not simply look it up. As a team writing in The Conversation put it, FIFA had not released the figures, so they built a computer model to check. Their estimate: almost 3.2 million tonnes of CO₂e, in the same range as Qatar 2022’s 3.8 million.

The problem was never a lack of effort. It was a lack of measurement.

This is the part that should matter to anyone who runs events. The controversy here is not really about whether a football tournament is high-carbon. Of course it is: you cannot move players, staff and hundreds of thousands of fans across a continent without a significant footprint. The controversy is that the number was never transparently measured and published in the first place.

That is what turns a big footprint into a credibility problem. A figure that is estimated behind closed doors, or left to independent researchers to reconstruct after the fact, invites exactly the scrutiny FIFA has faced for years. For the Qatar tournament, the advertising watchdog in FIFA’s own country found it had neither measured its emissions by accepted methods nor shown how it had offset them.

You cannot reduce and offset your carbon footprint if you have not honestly measured it.

The lesson scales all the way down

Most venues and event organisers are not operating at World Cup scale. But the principle is identical, and so is the direction regulation is heading. Vague claims of being green, unsupported by transparent measurement, are becoming a liability rather than an asset, whether you run a conference centre, an exhibition, or a single event. Evidence is becoming the point.

The organisations that come out of this well will not be the ones with the smallest footprint. They will be the ones who measured honestly, showed their working, and could point to a real number when asked. That is a choice available to every event, not just the ones with a global broadcast audience.

At One Tribe, that is the whole idea behind a live impact page: an event’s footprint, calculated on the recognised GHG protocol, in a form a venue or organiser can actually show a client rather than a claim you ask them to take on trust. When the next big tournament makes headlines for the figures it did not publish, the venues and events that did publish theirs will look all the more credible for it.

On a personal note, this one has been a hot topic in our office, and not only on the climate side. Our own team represents Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and the UK, so the football has been keenly felt around here. It is a reminder that these events bring people together in a way little else does, which is exactly why measuring their impact honestly matters, rather than quietly hoping no one asks.

Measure honestly, show your working, and the footprint becomes a story you can tell rather than one you have to defend.