Forest Green Rovers, recognized as the world's greenest football club by FIFA, is on the brink of historic success, advancing to the third tier of English football for the first time in their history. The club has not only made strides on the field but off it, advocating for eco-friendly practices and sustainability in sports. Its efforts have helped in fostering a community that aligns with environmental awareness, influencing fans to adopt similar values.

Since 2010, owner Dale Vince, a green energy industrialist, has led the transformation by integrating sustainable practices such as renewable energy sources and a vegan-only food policy at the club. Vince's innovative approach is not just limited to sports but extends to transportation and other sustainable ventures. Through these initiatives, Forest Green Rovers has gained significant global attention, with over 100 international fan groups and impressive media reach, supporting both environmental and economic growth.

Main takeaways from the video:

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. tantalisingly [ˈtæntəlaɪzɪŋli] - (adverb) - In a way that arouses expectation or desire for something unattainable. - Synonyms: (temptingly, alluringly, enticingly)

Boris Marina tantalisingly close to playing the third tier of english football for the first time in their history.

2. holistic [hoʊˈlɪstɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to or concerned with wholes or complete systems rather than with individual parts. - Synonyms: (integrated, entire, comprehensive)

Transforming the energy landscape was the priority. But Vince was becoming conscious that creating a more sustainable UK would require more holistic change in our daily lives.

3. carbon neutrality [ˈkɑːrbən nuːˈtræləti] - (noun) - A state of net zero carbon dioxide emissions, achieved by balancing emissions with carbon removal or simply eliminating emissions altogether. - Synonyms: (carbon zero, net-zero, emission-free)

This is Forest Green Rovers, un certified as carbon neutrality and described by FIFA as the world's greenest football club.

4. ethos [ˈiːθɒs] - (noun) - The characteristic spirit of a culture, era, or community as manifested in its beliefs and aspirations. - Synonyms: (spirit, character, culture)

What's perhaps most remarkable is how far the forest green ethos reaches.

5. skepticism [ˈskɛptɪˌsɪzəm] - (noun) - An attitude of doubting the truth of something. - Synonyms: (doubt, mistrust, disbelief)

So plenty of skepticism, but I didn't ever doubt it would work.

6. activism [ˈæktɪˌvɪzəm] - (noun) - The policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change. - Synonyms: (advocacy, engagement, involvement)

Whatever Project del Vince pursues, there's usually an element of activism, especially when it comes to tackling the climate crisis.

7. impressions [ɪmˈprɛʃənz] - (noun) - An effect, feeling, or image retained as a consequence of experience or exposure. - Synonyms: (impact, effect, influence)

We did a media survey recently. In the last twelve months, the global impact of forest green Rovers in all forms of media was 5 billion impressions.

8. emulate [ˈɛm.jʊ.leɪt] - (verb) - To strive to equal or match, especially by imitating. - Synonyms: (imitate, mirror, follow)

It's direct action that sets Vince and Forest green Rovers apart, removing meat and single use plastics from sale, using renewable energy.

9. solely [ˈsoʊli] - (adverb) - Not involving anyone or anything else; exclusively. - Synonyms: (exclusively, entirely, only)

The stadium is solely powered by green energy.

10. outlier [ˈaʊtˌlaɪər] - (noun) - A person or thing differing from all other members of a particular group or set. - Synonyms: (anomaly, deviation, departure)

Vince is an outlier when it comes to business leaders, let alone the owner of a sports team.

Football's Greenest Team Wants To Change Your Life

Boris Marina tantalisingly close to playing the third tier of english football for the first time in their history. Being successful on the pitch absolutely strengthens our eco message because it gives us credibility in the eyes of football fans. This is Forest Green Rovers, un certified as carbon neutrality and described by FIFA as the world's greenest football club.

The mission became about reaching sports fans, people that are passionate about a particular sport, in our case, football, and making them fans of the environment as well. And we've seen that work, our ethics and sustainability. We brought them here to the club, our fans come here, they see what we do, they go home and they start to change how they live. Football has an added kind of opportunity, which I think is a responsibility to use its platform to influence people. Thanks in large part to their owner, these minnows of the english game are proving to have an outsized influence.

The season just passed. Saw the team play in the fourth division. Thats about 70 teams below the likes of Giants Manchester City and Liverpool. But the team are on track for promotion to Ligue one, something never achieved in the clubs 133 year history. And it could have an even greater impact thanks to the club's leadership in fighting the climate crisis.

Based in the west of the country, Forest Green Rovers has become something of a passion project for the man often described as a green energy industrialist. When I got here in August 2010, the club had 13 players. That was it, part time, never trained on a full size pitch. So I helped them out. I thought, why not? The club was 120 years old, big part of its local community. At the end of the summer, they said, you need to be in charge, you need to be the chairman.

I was like, well, I don't. I'm not really busy. But they made it clear it was that or the club would fold. And so I thought about it and thought, well, you know, how hard can it be? I'll just run the football club. But I didn't think beyond that. I didn't think about anything. Vince is an outlier when it comes to business leaders, let alone the owner of a sports team. Dropping out of school, he joined a new age traveler community where he tinkered with trucks to get by.

In 1985, he was caught up in the battle of the Beanfield, an assault by british police on travellers heading towards Stonehenge. Get out on the doorhead. By the early nineties, he'd built a small windmill on his van, connected it to power lights and a water pump and found himself on a hill above Nailsworth, the home of Forest green rovers. Because I had a windmill on the roof of my trailer. I knew it was a windy spot because you're in touch with those things when your energy comes from the wind.

You've got batteries, you've got meters, you see it come in, you see it go out, you know you're in tune with what you use and where it comes from. So I knew it was a windy hill. And then I just had this idea that I could spend another ten years living this low impact lifestyle myself, or I could drop back in, try and build a big windmill. So I decided to do the second one. Vince started a wind energy business called ecotricity.

Its success turned him into a multi millionaire and was instrumental in establishing renewable power in the UK's energy mix. I mean, wind energy wasn't even 1% in Britain at that point. And what are we now? Renewable energy combined? About 40%. And most of that is wind energy. Transforming the energy landscape was the priority.

But Vince was becoming conscious that creating a more sustainable UK would require more holistic change in our daily lives. I'm no Jeremy Clarkson, I want to be clear about that, but I am a bit of a petrol head and I'm a tree hugger as well. I spend my life building windmills and fighting climate change, driving fast cars. What am I going to do about it? It's a big contradiction. It can't all be sandals and lentils, can it?

He went about building the UK's first electric vehicle charging network. More people would buy electric cars if there were more places to charge up, and people would build more charging points if more people bought electric cars. So we thought we'd jump in, build a national network and try and get the whole thing going. Then he helped build an electric sports car, the nemesis. Since then, he's started a vegan food company and even produces diamonds made with carbon captured from the atmosphere.

I got into energy in the nineties because the way that energy was made in Britain back then was the biggest single source of carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels. This is where the mission now comes from, because we found that transport was the second biggest and food was the third, and that between them, the 80% of everybody's personal carbon footprint. And that rule also applies to a football club of any size, a business, a whole country, basically.

And it was food that started the changes at Forest Green Rovers. Day one here of being in charge of the football club, I bumped into my first thing. We were serving a beef lasagna to our players and I sat down immediately with the chef and the manager and said, we can't do this, you know. So we took red meat off our menu on day one of being in charge. We upset some people and we said, look, try our food. This is why we do it. By the way, we didn't just do it, we explained why.

And if you don't like what we serve here, just bring your own. We don't mind. You know, I'm not vegan or vegetarian, but I don't mind not eating meat when I'm here. And I think quite a few people have recognized that, you know, they can eat meat any other time of the day or the week. Why not try vegan food and then be pleasantly surprised that they enjoy it. In the old days, you'd go up and you get a cup of coffee and somebody would say, you know, do you want some of this? And pull out a hit for. And you think, and they brought milk into the stadium. They brought cow's milk into the stadium. So those changes were quite hard, I think.

And I think some of the fan base moved away from the club as a consequence of that. But we've introduced a whole new set of supporters and followers who really like what the club stands for now. You know, food sales have gone through the roof, the crowd growth has been phenomenal as well. And all of these were things that people, plenty of people said wouldn't happen. They said, you know, people won't come to a game if they do, they won't eat, they'll bankrupt the club, all this kind of stuff. So plenty of skepticism, but I didn't ever doubt it would work.

Actually, I didn't really care either, because I couldn't run a football club that broke all of the rules that I lived by, you know, the things that I believe in, I couldn't do that and I would have rather walked away, but I didn't. I did it instead. And look where we are. To earn the title of the world's greenest football club, FGR have done much more than just change the menu. The stadium is solely powered by green energy. The pitch itself is organic, free from pesticides and weed killer, fed by seaweed and captured rainwater.

It's also cut with a solar powered mobot for electric car drivers. They can charge up during the game. I think it permeates to a huge level. It's a little bit of thinking out of the box. It's just trying to think about things in a different sort of way, not the way it's always been done. Well, it's just a passion that I have, you know, to see us get to a place where we live in a more sustainable way. We're not wasting stuff, not polluting stuff, not wiping out nature, and not causing the climate crisis.

The players and staff can eat what they want, but when at work, training or match day, there's only vegan food served. Wing back Kane Wilson, the league's player of the season, is one of an increasing number of professional athletes who are turning away from meat. I had an injury, tendinitis, which is like an injury, it was inflammatory, it's like in my knee. And I was struggling. I tried everything to get rid of this injury. I couldn't. I couldn't shake it and it was costing me. It's cost me money because I wasn't playing. So I had to kind of try and find a way to get rid of it.

I was going to go for an operation. I was thinking of all different options and I just seen an athlete in America talking about how he had suffered from it and changed his diet and it had gone. So I said, well, that's what I've got to do now. I mean, it worked for me. Hands down. A large number of high profile athletes extol the benefits of going vegan from sports as diverse as tennis, basketball, ultra marathon racing and even bodybuilding.

Some at Forest Green are convinced their vegan only food rule might be contributing to their recent success. The team hasnt dropped out of the top three places all season. So does playing for the Worlds greenest club change anything for a player? He probably just rewired you a little bit in terms of maybe things that you wasn't as conscious of before.

It's everything. I mean, is everything involved with Forest Green? I didn't even know it was possible for a t shirt to make out coffee. I mean, I didn't know that was a thing. What's perhaps most remarkable is how far the forest green ethos reaches. Far beyond the few thousand people of local village. Nailsworth.

Welcome to the Heavens Devils podcast. A Forest Green Rovers podcast by two Americans who have no idea what to talk about. About. Yeah. So we were brought in by the vegan and green aspects of the club. It matched our personal ethics. And so once we found this club that is doing so much good off the pitch, and we're like, we're gonna give our money and our time to a team.

Let's do it to a team that is. That matters. That matters. Just like the clash, we're the only band that matters for us. FJR, the only club that matters. Nathan and Shyam have made it over from the US for a critical game in Forest Green Rovers history. It's the end of April 2022 and with four games to go of the season, a draw away at Bristol Rovers would secure promotion to the league above.

Promotion. That's all I want. One point or two. True to form, the greenest club in the world arrives on an electric bus, something the club hopes to make a permanent fixture next season. Dale is in relaxed mood, happy to see a vegan pie on another club's menu. Vegan pie the mum. How often do you see that?

Oh, you know what? It's quite common. It's amazing. We had Carlisle a few months ago and they had two kinds of vegan pies leading the way for the majority of the season. Forest Green. It's played in low and except wide. Wilson into 87. Hendry Short, brilliantly stopped by Bell, Shaw, Boris Green have had some big opportunities.

How is this game? Still nil nil Rovers want a free kick but it's full time and it's joyous. Scenes for Forest Green Rovers, the goalless draw is enough to send the team up a division. The highest they've ever climbed in their 133 year history today belongs to Forrest Green Rovers.

Before securing promotion, Forest Green estimated they had over 100 international fan groups. But it's not just down to what the players have achieved on the pitch. We did a media survey recently. In the last twelve months, the global impact of forest green Rovers in all forms of media was 5 billion impressions. Right. And that was as a League two football club.

So I would say, you know, we have a global reach and that's a good thing. In League one, we'll just have a bigger global reach. That reach doesn't just elevate the green message. It's good for business too. More fans generally means more shirt sales and more pay per view streams.

But crucially for a small club like Forest green, it's the ability to compete in the big leagues and that comes from sponsorship. Businesses are adopting green things, products, services, whatever it is, and are looking for places to advertise themselves and to sponsor. And we find ourselves here as very visible, you know, greenest club in the world kind of stuff.

And so we've naturally attracted a lot of sponsors in the last couple of years that other clubs at our level won't get. Don't get purpose is the most important thing. Right. As a business or a football club, we have to make money to exist, but we don't exist to make money. Right. It's like the old do you live to eat or do you eat to live?

We only eat to live. If you exist to make money, then you'll take the hard nosed business approach. You'll hurt the environment around you, the people around you, because you're chasing money above everything else. So we don't do that. We have a different purpose. I just don't think, actually there ever has to be a conflict between the environment and economics and ethics.

Actually, I think we can have all three. With promotion to the third tier of english football secured, Forest Green's journey has entered a new phase. The club is soon to start building a larger stadium. The world's first made all from timber eco park, even includes a green tech hub for local business.

Whatever Project del Vince pursues, there's usually an element of activism, especially when it comes to tackling the climate crisis. Back in March, campaigners interrupted Premier League games in the just stop oil protests. It turns out very Vince had accidentally funded it. The need to stop oil transcends sport, it transcends motorways, you know, transcends everything. They reached out and said, look, we want to start a new campaign.

Would it help us with a bit of cash? And I did. What they didn't say to me was that they were planning to disrupt football matches, which I find amusing. It's direct action that sets Vince and Forest green Rovers apart, removing meat and single use plastics from sale, using renewable energy.

Other sports teams, even some of the biggest, have been recognized for their work on reducing their environmental impact. But like plenty of businesses nowadays, many are accused of trying to assuage any guilt, forming in more eco conscious fans and simply not doing enough.

A portion of every Red Sox ticket will be contributed to the Aspiration Planet Protection Fund, which will use carbon credits to offset Fenway emissions. Ultimately, Vince has found sport to be a powerful element of communication in challenging the status quo of the climate challenge in his own football team.

He doesn't just reach his direct community, but all those that come into contact with it, whether at home or abroad. From supporting the conservation of the ocean to flying the palestinian flag on matchday, Forest Green Rovers has an identity like no other club, something that's hard to come by in the world of modern day sport.

And while FGR might be unique, other clubs are taking note. There's a pump laying outside the front of our ground now that's on its way to Port Vale soon because we had a conversation about car charging and they want some advice and we actually had some old hardware, so we said, we'll give you a charger.

That was before they beat exited for us on the last day of the season, which won us the league. We are going up. So we are going up. We are going up. Have you embraced veganism yet? No, I haven't. No, no. Don't tell Dale, for God's sake.

Sustainability, Sports, Football, Technology, Innovation, Environmental Awareness, Bloomberg Originals