The Price India Pays For A FIFA World Cup It Never Plays
- Nivedita Bansal
- 8 hours ago
- 10 min read
From dirty fossil fuel sponsorship to polluting tournament planning, the FIFA world cup is accelerating climate change vulnerable countries like India.
Kashmir is rarely allowed to be just a place. Every headline seems to ask us to choose a side, defend a position, or argue over its future. But in September 2014, the valley was consumed by a crisis that cut across those divisions. The worst floods in more than a century swallowed neighbourhoods, cut off entire towns, and left thousands of families to piece together lives that had quite literally been washed away.
When the waters finally receded, they left behind more than shattered homes and broken roads. They left a generation of young people with nowhere to go. Seeing children drift through the neighbourhood with little to do, journalist Shamim Meraj and his late friend Sandeep Chattoo made a simple decision. They bought 100 footballs and handed them out. When they returned a week later, the same boys who had once wandered the streets were chasing a football instead. That simple act would eventually grow into Real Kashmir FC.
It is an extraordinary story. A football club that emerged in the aftermath of one of the worst climate disasters Kashmir had ever witnessed. It is a reminder of what football can offer when communities are forced to begin again. But it should also leave us deeply unsettled. Because if the climate crisis continues to intensify, stories like Real Kashmir FC will not remain rare for long. They will become part of a pattern we can no longer ignore. And with the FIFA World Cup once again commanding the attention of billions, is this a reality football can afford to keep ignoring?
(You can also check out: Who is really drowning in Indian monsoons? — on why the same flood carries a very different weight depending on who you are and where you live.)
A country that watches, but never plays
If you have ever spent time during a Football World Cup in Kerala, Kolhapur, Goa, or anywhere across the Northeast, you know just how intense football in India can get. Entire neighbourhoods pick sides overnight. Streets are split between Argentina and Brazil. Giant cut-outs of Messi, Ronaldo, and Neymar take over junctions and village squares. People stay up all night, cafés are packed at 2 a.m., and every goal is screamed, argued over, and celebrated like it actually happened here. India has never qualified for a FIFA World Cup, but that has never stopped the obsession. When the tournament ends, nothing really changes. European club jerseys still dominate our streets, our school grounds, and our local pitches. Football is everywhere, even if our national team has never made it to the biggest stage.
The fact that India has never qualified for a World Cup is a conversation that has been had countless times. This is about something far more important. India may not have a team at football's biggest tournament, but it has one of the world's largest football audiences. That means the decisions made by FIFA do not end in Zurich or inside World Cup stadiums. They shape what millions of Indian fans watch, celebrate, and eventually come to accept as part of the game. The sponsors on the advertising boards, the logos on the broadcasts, the companies football chooses to stand beside, all become part of the sport's identity. And that is precisely why what happens at the World Cup matters just as much in Mumbai, Kochi, Kolhapur and Imphal as it does in the host cities themselves.
Look at who's on the boards
If you've been following the climate conversation or the football news this year, you've probably heard about the concerns over extreme heat and the growing use of hydration breaks. Yet one of the biggest stories of this World Cup has received far less attention. There is one name that follows almost every match. You see it every time the camera pans across the pitch. You see it behind every post-match interview. You see it so often that, before long, it simply fades into the background. That name is Aramco. The fact that most of us have stopped noticing it is exactly what makes its presence at this World Cup so significant.
Most football fans know the name Aramco. Very few know what it actually does. That is precisely the problem.
Aramco is not a sports company. It is the world's largest oil company, one of history's biggest corporate polluters, and is 98.5% owned by the Saudi Arabian state. Yet its logo now sits at the heart of football's biggest tournament.
Between 1965 and 2017, Aramco was responsible for more than 4% of all global emissions, more than the entire United Kingdom produced over the same period. Despite every scientific warning that the world needs to move rapidly away from fossil fuels, Aramco continues to expand oil and gas production. Today, just 0.01% of the energy it produces comes from renewable sources. Its leadership has made its position unambiguous. In 2024, CEO Amin Nasser urged the world to "abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas" and to invest even more heavily in fossil fuels instead. This stance runs directly against the scientific consensus and the global shift toward renewable energy.
The company's record extends far beyond its emissions. In 2023, a group of UN human rights experts warned Aramco's CEO that its fossil fuel operations and climate misinformation were undermining the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Aramco is projected to emit around 27 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2018 and 2030. According to the widely cited "1,000-ton rule," which estimates that every 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted contributes to one premature death this century, those emissions could be associated with roughly 27 million future premature deaths.
Aramco is also the financial backbone of the Saudi Arabian state. Between 2016 and 2023, it generated an estimated US$250 million every day, accounting for between 27% and 40% of the country's GDP. That revenue helps sustain a government that has faced sustained international criticism over human rights abuses, including the killing of journalists, the imprisonment of women's rights activists, mass executions of dissidents, and the deaths of migrant workers on Aramco-funded mega-projects, some of them directly linked to football.
This is what sportswashing actually looks like
None of this fits comfortably into the word "sponsor." Sportswashing is often spoken about as though it were an abstract accusation, a state or corporation using the emotional pull of sport to distract from an uncomfortable record, but the accusation only carries weight when you understand the scale of what is being laundered, and that scale is precisely what most football fans never see. This is not a soft drink company trying to sell another bottle. It is one of the largest and most profitable fossil fuel companies in history, responsible for more historical emissions than the entire United Kingdom, generating a quarter of a billion dollars every day for a state that has been repeatedly accused of obstructing international climate action and condemned for serious human rights abuses, now being woven into the fabric of football's biggest spectacle as though it were just another commercial partner.
When Aramco's logo sits alongside the FIFA World Cup, it is not merely being introduced to football fans. It is being stripped of the context that ought to accompany its name and gets wrapped instead in the trust, joy, and legitimacy that football commands. That is why this sponsorship is so valuable. The larger Aramco's role in driving the climate crisis, the greater the need to make it appear ordinary, familiar, and inseparable from the game itself, until one of the world's biggest polluters ceases to look like a corporation that should be questioned and starts to look like a brand that simply belongs.
And the cost of accepting it isn't theoretical, and it isn't happening somewhere else.
(You can also check out: Sustainability in Sports — on how the environmental footprint of sport reaches far beyond the pitch, from jersey manufacturing to stadium design.)
The climate crisis is already here. And it is unfolding across India, in real time.
In 2024, India recorded its hottest year since records began in 1901, and it was far from an isolated anomaly. Decades of research now point in the same direction. Extreme heat across the country is becoming more frequent, more intense, and more deadly because of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. Scientists have already attributed a twofold increase in the likelihood of severe heatwaves across central and southern India to anthropogenic factors, with fossil fuels being the primary driver. They have also documented a sixfold increase in simultaneous day and night heatwaves under continued warming. Between 1976 and 2018, the number of hot days across much of India increased by nearly 25%, while heat stress exposure has continued to worsen across districts over the past four decades. If emissions continue on their current trajectory, researchers project a sharp rise in heat-related deaths across Indian cities, with the Deccan Plateau and western India expected to face some of the gravest consequences.
The burden is no longer measured only in projections. It is already visible across India. A study of ten Indian cities found that the growing toll of heat-related illness falls disproportionately on countries like India, where rapid urbanisation, inadequate housing, and the steady loss of urban green cover amplify every degree of warming. Across South Asia, researchers project that annual deaths linked to extreme heat could exceed 400,000 by 2045 if emissions continue unchecked, underscoring how quickly a climate emergency is becoming a public health crisis.
(You can also check out: The Forgotten 16%: Disability at the Frontlines of Climate Change — on how India's rising heatwave death toll lands hardest, and most invisibly, on disabled communities left out of climate planning altogether.)
The same warming atmosphere is also reshaping India's monsoon. The IPCC has warned that climate change is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall, a pattern already reflected in the devastating floods that have struck Kashmir, Kerala, Assam, Delhi, and Mumbai in recent years. While individual flood events require their own attribution studies, the science behind the trend is settled. Every tonne of fossil fuel burned adds more heat to the atmosphere, allowing it to hold more moisture and release it in increasingly intense bursts, making the kind of floods that displace families, destroy livelihoods, and overwhelm communities across India increasingly likely.
(You can also check out: Monsoons: a lifeline and threat, will climate change tip the balance? — a closer look at the mechanics of the monsoon system that built the subcontinent, and how warming is now pulling it out of balance. And on Mumbai specifically: Mumbai Coastal Forest: A Place to Pause In a City That Doesn't Sleep, on what the city's heat and flood burden does to the people living through it every single year.)
What football can actually do
None of this requires reinventing the sport. It requires the same kind of deliberate choices football has made before, applied to how mega-events are built and funded.
Reduce the size of tournaments. A World Cup that has grown from 64 to 104 matches across 16 cities on an entire continent cannot be squared with any serious climate commitment. Bigger is not automatically better, and it is certainly not lower carbon.
Host with existing infrastructure. Building new stadiums, airports, and transport networks for a month-long tournament generates enormous emissions that outlast the event by decades. Tournaments hosted across cities and countries that already have the stadiums and transport in place can dramatically reduce that footprint.
Restrict fossil fuel advertising in sport, just as tobacco advertising was restricted. This should not be treated as a symbolic gesture but as a formal, enforceable rule that keeps companies like Aramco off football's biggest stage.
Apply the lessons of the tobacco ban directly. That ban worked because it was comprehensive, not partial, and because it recognised that the sponsorship itself was the problem, not simply the way it was presented. Fossil fuel sponsorship deserves the same standard rather than a slower, quieter phase-out.
Make smaller, lower-carbon tournament models the norm. This should apply not only to the World Cup but also to regional and youth football, ensuring that climate-conscious hosting becomes standard practice rather than an exception reserved for the sport's biggest events.
What football owes the people who play it
Football has never been afraid to take a moral position. It takes a knee before kick-off. It runs anti-racism campaigns, hands out lifetime bans for discriminatory behaviour, and rightly insists that some issues are too important for the game to stay silent about. So why is climate change treated differently? Why is one of the greatest threats to football's future still dismissed as someone else's problem? The same heat making pitches unplayable across South Asia, the same floods destroying the grounds where children first fall in love with the game, and the same rising temperatures forcing changes to the World Cup are all consequences of the crisis football continues to help normalise. The sport confronted tobacco sponsorship when the evidence became impossible to ignore. The evidence on fossil fuels is every bit as clear. What is missing is not proof. It is courage.
FIFA cannot keep claiming to protect the future of football while taking money from the very industry helping to undermine it. It must end its partnership with fossil fuel companies like Aramco, stop expanding tournaments without regard for their climate impact, and begin investing seriously in the communities already paying the price. The real threat to football is not a disrupted television schedule or a postponed kick-off. It is the child in Kerala who cannot train because of dangerous heat, the community club in Kashmir rebuilding after another flood, and the millions of young players across South Asia inheriting a game that is becoming harder to play with every passing year. Football is more than a spectacle. It is part of people's lives. If FIFA truly believes that football belongs to everyone, then it has a responsibility to protect the places where the game is actually played, not just the stadiums where it is sold.
References
BBC News. (n.d.). [Article]. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3vnl0yxg53o
Fossil Free Football. (n.d.). Fossil Free Football. https://www.fossilfreefootball.org/
I
nternational Energy Agency. (n.d.). Renewables and low-emissions fuels. https://www.iea.org/energy-system/renewables-and-low-emissions-fuels
Nature. (2025). [Journal article]. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-025-01647-0
The Guardian. (2019, October 9). Revealed: 20 firms linked to a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. http://theguardian.com/environment/2019/oct/09/revealed-20-firms-third-carbon-emissions
The Guardian. (2023, November 27). Revealed: Saudi Arabia's plan to keep the world hooked on oil. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/27/revealed-saudi-arabia-plan-poor-countries-oil
The Guardian. (2024, March 20). Fossil fuels can no longer compete with clean energy, IEA says. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/mar/20/fossil-fuels-oil-and-gas-clean-energy
The Guardian. (2025, March 5). Half of world's CO₂ emissions come from 36 fossil fuel firms, study shows. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/mar/05/half-of-worlds-co2-emissions-come-from-36-fossil-fuel-firms-study-shows
The Guardian. (2025, October 28). 'Change course now': Humanity has missed 1.5°C climate target, says UN head. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/28/change-course-now-humanity-has-missed-15c-climate-target-says-un-head
The Guardian. (2025, November 15). £170,000 a minute: Why Saudi Arabia is the biggest blocker of climate action. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/nov/15/170000-a-minute-why-saudi-arabia-is-the-biggest-blocker-of-climate-action
The New York Times. (2024, November 18). Saudi Arabia's role in obstructing global efforts to phase out fossil fuels. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/climate/saudi-arabia-obstruction-fossil-fuels.html
The New York Times. (2024, November 30). Saudi Arabia and the global plastics treaty negotiations. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/30/climate/saudi-arabia-global-plastic-treaty.html
World Oil. (2024, July 4). Aramco makes seven Saudi Arabian oil and gas discoveries, reports say. https://worldoil.com/news/2024/7/4/aramco-makes-seven-saudi-arabian-oil-and-gas-discoveries-reports-say/
Comments