Pro soccer team — or football, where they're based — Wrexham AFC faced criticism recently for taking a 37-minute jet flight to a match in place of a three-hour bus ride, BBC reported.
The team still drove much of the journey just to reach the airport, and the flight only covered approximately one-fifth of the total distance, leading critics to wonder at its necessity.
In its TikTok video about the subject, campaign group Fossil Free Football pointed out that, additionally, the jet had to fly from its home base — "presumably empty" — just to pick up the group. It then flew all the way back to home base, only to return for the homeward journey the following day.
Wrexham is a team co-owned by actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, and the two of them faced particular backlash for the hypocritical move. In fact, just four days after the 37-minute flight, Reynolds traveled to New York to pledge the team's public support to Football for the Goals, an emissions reduction project by the United Nations.
In player Paul Mullin's book, My Wrexham Story, Mullin describes the owners' approach to traveling, which tells somewhat of a different story. McElhenney apparently said that the team was cleared to fly to any match that was taking place over two hours away by vehicle, which means that approximately two-thirds of all their matches now fall into the flight-eligible category.
Private jets generate massively disproportionate pollution compared to trains, buses, and even their commercial counterparts. A passenger on a private jet generates 14 times more pollution than one on a commercial flight and 50 times more than one on a train, per Transport and the Environment.
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The result of all this pollution, ironically, has wreaked havoc on soccer as a sport, as a warming climate is supercharging weather events around the globe. Fossil Free Football mentioned how thousands of soccer, golf, football, and other "grassroots" sport matches are already canceled each year due to weather and climate conditions, per the BBC. Instead, they are calling on leagues and athletes to adopt more environmentally friendly policies — and ditch the jets.
"No one wants this problem to get worse at any level," they said.
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