Ordinarily, thoughts of football clubs and building projects don’t tend to come with positive assumptions about the environment.
When tens of thousands of people tend to head towards one area, with many of them driving in cars, it isn’t exactly seen as a good thing by those that are concerned with the likes of Global Warming.
Football grounds see water flushing for toilets and sprinklers on the pitch alongside huge floodlights burning in the night to light up the players.
It seems like no one in the game cares about the environment, but with their new stadium plans Forest Green Rovers are looking to change that for the better.
A Stadium Made of Wood
On the third of November 2016, Forest Green Rovers announced that a design had been chosen for the proposed new 5,000 seat stadium that it wanted to build in the Eco Park project, which is located next to Junction 13 of the M5 in Gloucestershire.
The design was of a football ground made almost entirely of wood, which included the cantilevers for the roof. Boasting an ability to be expanded to a capacity of 10,000, the plans were rejected by the local planning authorities in the June of 2019 before then being accepted with some alterations later that year. The Football League gave its consent two years later.
๐ฃ “I look forward to eating that later.” ๐ฑ ๐ข
New head coach Duncan Ferguson is ready to embrace the meat-free policy at Forest Green Rovers admitting he has never eaten vegan food before pic.twitter.com/GBIHLOMIiB
โ Football Daily (@footballdaily) January 26, 2023
The aim of the club’s Chairman, Dale Vince, along with all of those responsible for building it is that it will have the smallest carbon footprint of any football stadium anywhere in the world. It has now got to the point that Stroud District Council has approved the plans, which Vince’s company Ecotricity Group Limited put forward, have gained approval.
This means that building work can start, which will lead to as many as 4,000 jobs for the local area. It is, in Vince’s words, a ‘green tech business park‘ that the stadium and ‘other things’ will be part of, offering a ‘20% biodiversity boost compared to today’s faming background level’.
Forest Green Rovers’ ‘Green’ Credentials
Since the moment that Dale Vince took over at Forest Green Rovers, the club has had a push towards a more sustainable way of operating. In 2018, for example, the club became the first in the world to earn a carbon neutral certification from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’s initiative Climate Neutral Now.
It was described by FIFA as the ‘greenest team in the world’, with the club having been a vegan offering since 2015. The Vegan Society gave Forest Green Rovers its Vegan Trademark in 2017, with other efforts around the football club also being in place to make it as sustainable as possible.
The pitch at the current stadium is organic. There are solar panels on the roof and the lawnmower used to cut the grass is electric. They don’t allow single-use plastics and cleaning materials are produced on-site. All of these are things that the club will be looking to take to the new stadium, which will boast a ‘distinct appearance’ thanks to its roof scape.
That roof not only fits in with the ground’s rural setting but also has a design that allows for the integration of energy efficiency measures, to say nothing of the fact that the stadium as a whole will boast resilience against the likes of heatwaves or flooding in the future.
A Stadium for the Area to be Proud Of
The likelihood is that the new stadium will be something for the local area to be proud of. Located just eight and a half miles away from the club’s spiritual home of Nailsworth, the fact that it can be expanded to offer enough room for 10,000 supporters if Forest Green Rovers are successful will be seen as a positive mindset by supporters.
Whilst some of the world’s biggest leaders are completely ignoring the threat of Climate Change, the fact that Vince has instilled such an environmentally-friendly mindset at the Gloucestershire club should be considered to be a genuine positive. The world might be burning, but Forest Green Rovers won’t add to that.
OFF THE WOODWORK! | Zaha Hadid Architects Unveils First Ever All-Timber Football Stadium – Forest Green Rovers’ Eco Park Stadium
โ LOWER BLOCK (@lowerblock.bsky.social) 12 December 2024 at 11:16
It also means that the new ground will be future-proofed against legislation that may be brought in in the future. On top of that, the club is also looking to ensure that it does its bit to help the housing crisis, given that The New Lawn, the side’s current home, will be demolished in order to make way for 95 new homes.
Supporters that are so inclined will be able to argue that they have got behind a club that has done more than any recent government when it comes to some of the biggest and most serious problems facing the world. Obviously rivals will point out that success on the pitch is what matters, but if there is no pitch to play on then who are the real winners?