Players gripped by injury fear as World Cup draws near, a look around the globe at the players in action, football’s growing power in the face of climate change, and more.
The World Cup is still two months away now, but the build up to it has already been as fascinating as the final itself. We’ve been talking about players and coaches and everything from how a game might be affected by a poor pitch and the quality of a stadium to the players’ mental health.
We’ve been tracking them with wearable technology, including a new study from Sports Data. It compares the mental wellbeing of players at the World Cup with their counterparts around the world, and what’s been happening in football’s history to help us understand how it’s changed over time.
So, what are we looking at here today? Well, it may seem counterintuitive but the world Cup is really only a fraction of the story of how football has changed since the birth of the World Cup in 1930.
There are three essential things to keep in mind as you listen to what we’ve been saying here about the role of football in the context of the climate crisis.
First, it’s important to remember that the climate crisis is only one part of the wider and more complex story of global warming, or global warming itself is not just about the global climate. It’s also about climate change, the emissions associated with a warming planet and how those emissions are affecting us or the way we live.
Second, the World Cup is an increasingly powerful way of connecting the two stories of the environment and climate change.
The United Nations, world governments, football’s global governing body FIFA and its affiliated leagues are going to the event together. The World Cup is a global event. It’s a competition for the entire planet, with a global audience.
Third, we can only understand football in the context of its history in the first place. And the story of football is far more remarkable than the story of the World Cup alone.
Football has become one of the world’s most powerful institutions. While the World Cup may