ABSTRACT
Football is more popular than Jesus and John Lennon combined. Football is a universal currency, a lingua franca—the common ground of culture. On the surface, football appears to be among the least ecologically malevolent of pastimes: it requires a ball, a field, and some players, as opposed to the engines, roads, and carbon-fueled speed of Formula 1 or NASCAR. An ecological footprint model has been applied to football by estimating the impact of both touristic and local consumption at the England and Wales' Football Association Cup Final of 2004, held in Cardiff. Staging a World Cup is massively expensive. The men's World Cup Finals are rightly pilloried for precisely the obverse of the positive claims made for them. Originally, European football clubs were small, city-based businesses, drawing on athletes who had grown up close to their grounds. Clubs are being bought up with new money from the United States, Russia, Asia, and the Arab world.
