Green FIFA, Grey Reality

Ibrahim Fawakherji — ArchUp

In recent days, investigative reports have circulated criticizing the president of FIFA for the number of private flights he took during the World Cup, the dozens of hours spent in the air, and the hundreds of tons of carbon emissions those flights reportedly produced.

I am not here to defend him. Nor to attack him.

What caught my attention was a completely different angle.

If we are going to talk about sustainability, let us talk about it fully. Not reduce it to the travel habits of one institutional figure while ignoring the system that made those habits inevitable.

This edition of the World Cup is hosted across three countries. The United States, Canada, and Mexico. That decision alone made aircraft a structural component of the tournament, not a peripheral one. Players travel between countries. Coaches travel. Referees travel. Media travel. Sponsors travel. Supporters travel. Some national teams crossed thousands of kilometers between group stage matches. The logistics of this tournament were, by design, airborne.

If carbon footprint is the genuine concern, why has the conversation focused on one person’s itinerary while leaving the operational model of the entire tournament unexamined?

Sustainability is not holding the individual accountable while exempting the system.

Sustainability begins at the moment a host is selected. It begins with the decision to distribute a tournament across three countries rather than one. It lives in the stadium locations, in the match schedule, in the distances that millions of people will travel over the course of a month. These are not secondary considerations that can be addressed after the opening ceremony. They are the primary decisions that determine the environmental cost of the event before a single ticket is sold.

The three-country model may have served real purposes. Economic, political, organizational. It may have been, from FIFA’s perspective, the best available option among difficult choices. That is a legitimate argument and it deserves to be made seriously.

But you cannot raise a sustainability banner and simultaneously ignore that the foundational decision of the tournament carries an enormous environmental cost. The banner and the decision cannot coexist without one of them being dishonest.

This is a problem the architecture profession understands well.

A sustainable building does not begin with solar panels installed on a completed roof. It begins with the first decision the architect makes on paper: orientation, massing, material selection, relationship to climate and site. Everything that comes after is a response to those early commitments. You cannot make a fundamentally unsustainable building sustainable through the accessories you add to it later.

Global events work the same way.

Sustainability does not begin after the tournament kicks off. It begins at the moment someone decides where it will be held, how it will be structured, and how many flights it will impose on the world as a precondition of its own existence.

The issue is not Infantino’s flight log.

The issue is that sustainability loses its meaning when it becomes a headline instrument rather than a standard applied consistently across all decisions, from the smallest operational detail to the largest structural choice.

If the goal is genuine accountability, then the conversation needs to be about the whole system.

Not just the most visible person moving through it.

One additional point often overlooked in sustainability discussions is the physical infrastructure surrounding major events. During the tournament, many supporters received printed accreditation cards, commemorative badges, and other physical credentials that required manufacturing, packaging, international transportation, and in many cases dedicated collection points. If sustainability is to be evaluated consistently, these seemingly minor organizational decisions also deserve scrutiny. A digital-first credentialing system delivered through secure mobile applications could significantly reduce material consumption, logistics, and associated carbon emissions. These operational details rarely attract public attention, yet they collectively represent a substantial source of avoidable emissions. Meaningful environmental criticism should therefore extend beyond high-profile individuals and examine the countless physical processes embedded within the event itself.

✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight

The article’s central argument — that sustainability discourse loses its analytical integrity when it focuses on the individual actor while exempting the system that produced the behavior — is structurally sound, but it identifies a phenomenon that extends well beyond FIFA’s governance: it describes the operational logic of greenwashing at the institutional scale, where the sustainability claim functions not as a measurable commitment but as a reputational instrument deployed selectively to absorb criticism without altering the underlying decision architecture. The three-country hosting model was not an environmental oversight that sustainability branding can correct retroactively; it was a geopolitical and commercial negotiation whose environmental cost was externalized from the decision framework entirely, precisely because the parties with authority to make that decision — FIFA, the host federations, the commercial partners — bore none of the carbon liability that the operational model would distribute across millions of passenger movements. The architectural analogy the article draws is its most precise contribution: a building’s environmental performance is determined at the moment of orientation and massing, not at the moment of solar panel installation, and the same irreversibility governs event infrastructure — a condition that connects directly to what From Football to Super Bowl examined in the SoFi model, where the foundational economic decisions about what a global event is actually for are made in procurement rooms long before the sustainability banner is unfurled at the opening ceremony, and where the banner’s primary function has always been to redirect the conversation away from those rooms.