Earlier this year, Richard Masters , Chief Executive at the Premier League, launched their Environmental Sustainability strategy.

It focusses on three key priorities :

1. To become net zero by 2040
2. To support decarbonisation across the league
3. To raise awareness of climate change

As a football fan and someone on a mission to reduce the environmental impact of the internet this caught my eye.

Many people don’t realise that the internet is responsible for higher global greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation industry.

With over 60% of the global population now spending 40% of their waking hours online, this trend is set to continue leading to predictions that the internet will be responsible for 40% of global greenhouse emissions by 2040.

Given these alarming figures I wonder if the Premier League are prioritising or even aware of the potential carbon footprint of the club websites in relation to their decarbonisation objectives?

Club websites serve huge global fanbases and are typically content heavy, particularly with images and videos which are energy-intensive to store and transfer to users’ devices.

Multiple this usage across the 20 Premier League club websites and the cumulative impact of millions of page loads results in a significant carbon footprint.

So this all got me thinking…

Who would win the Premier League if the winner was the club the smallest website carbon footprint?

I chatted to the folks at Cardamon about the idea and they kindly offered evaluate the websites using their carbon calculator.

To make the results comparable, we calculated the carbon footprint of 10,000 visits to the homepages of each site (clearly the footprint of the entire websites will be significantly higher).**

And the results are in!

So hats off to Man City for having the lowest homepage carbon footprint, but let’s face it they’re the best of a bad bunch.

It’s no surprise that Ipswich are anchored to the bottom of the table given their hefty 29 MB homepage.

If the Premier League are serious about meeting their sustainability goals then decarbonising club websites must be a key part of their strategy.

Even a tactical focus on switching them all to green hosting would make a huge difference and feels like a simple tap in.

The benefits of low carbon websites

The benefits of low carbon websites extend far beyond the environment.

Low carbon websites are deliberately designed to be as simple as possible making them easier to use, download faster and available to more people.

Their simplicity means they are more efficient, effective and use less energy – making them better for people, performance, planet and profit.

So what about the carbon footprint of your own website?

How much do you know about the carbon footprint of your websites and what is being done within your organisation to minimise it?

What risk does ignoring your digital carbon footprint pose to your reputation, values or wider sustainability goals?

I’d argue a very significant one.

The climate crisis demands that every responsible organisation should make a plan to minimise the environmental impact of their digital product and services, but many simply don’t know where to start.

I’ve created some simple and practical free tools that will help get the ball rolling:

• Here’s a simple, pragmatic and tactical decarbonisation approach you can take to minimise the environmental impact of your website.
• Here’s a Digital Sustainability Strategy Template (Google Doc) that will help you create an action plan for your wider digital sustainability strategy.

It would be wonderful to see a very different story in the table next year, seeing the reds, blues and lilywhites becoming greener.

I hope this helps to nudge the clubs in the right direction to minimise the environmental impact of their websites.

If anyone needs advice, help kicking off or hands-on support with any of this I’m here to help – just drop me a line.

cc Will Hutton Ellen Shaddock Pete Bradshaw Hannah Mansour James Beale Tom H. Chris Goodwin Rishi Jain Charlotte Miell Helen Hughes Eloise Thompson AIEMA Marcus Parry Max Wilkes-Barker Alex Evans Jesse Foyle Katie Cross

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**Cardamon runs with ad blocking on so the impact of adverts on these websites are not included in the results

Thanks again to Adam Newman and the crew at Cardamon for running the numbers for me – here’s the full data set