Latest news with #FootballfortheGoals
Scoop
21-05-2025
- Sport
- Scoop
Champions For Change: World Football Teams Up With UN Development Goals
The Football for the Goals Forum brought UN leaders and some of the top voices in the world's most popular sport to UN Headquarters in New York for the inaugural Champions for Change: Football and the UN Unite for the SDGs event. The UN has long recognised the role of sport in advancing the SDGs – promoting peace, gender equality, health, and climate action – as affirmed in a General Assembly Resolution on Sport adopted in December 2022. With unparalleled global reach, football holds a unique position to drive progress on these goals. Launched in July 2022, Football for the Goals is a UN initiative engaging the international football community to advocate for the SDGs. Wednesday's forum aimed to mobilise the football community for action across key SDG areas. The kick off After introductions from football executives, UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric, UN communications chief Melissa Fleming, and the Qatari Representative to the UN, the opening panel – Bolstering Community Engagement with the SDGs – outlined the origins of Football for the Goals and explored how the football community can deepen its contribution to the SDGs. This was followed by a brief discussion on the football sector's commitment to climate sustainability. The programme then shifted to some of the Forum's most substantive panels, exploring how football both reflects global inequalities – between the Global South and North, and between men and women – and has the potential to help address them. North-South divide Júlia Pimenta of Street Child United highlighted that football organisations in the Global South, which serve the children who need support most, often lack adequate funding and must compete with well-resourced programmes in the Global North. Sarah Van Vooren of Atoot in Nepal similarly noted that grassroots organisations connecting football and sustainable development, frequently lack the resources needed to reach their full potential. When these organisations are properly supported, they can provide safe, educational environments for children – often with life-changing results. Panellists emphasised that funding such initiatives is key to advancing SDGs related to education and reducing inequality. Levelling the gender playing field Jayathma Wickramanayake, a policy advisor on sports partnerships at UN Women, noted that the gender equality agency is responsible for most of the targets under SDG 5 related to closing the gender gap. She emphasised that progress has been slow – and in some areas, it's even regressing – largely due to the persistence of rigid social norms, attitudes, and behaviours. These norms often manifest in the sports world through unequal pay and incidents of sexual harassment. However, Ms. Wickramanayake and other panellists highlighted how sport can be a powerful tool to challenge stereotypes and empower women and girls to succeed – both on and off the pitch.
BBC News
01-04-2025
- Sport
- BBC News
Wrexham AFC criticised for flying to League One Wycombe match
Wrexham AFC have come under fire after using a private jet to fly to and from a League One away game against promotion rivals Wycombe Wanderers. The plane, chartered from the Jersey, travelled a total of 1,178 miles (1,896km) to take them on a 37-minute flight instead of a three-hour coach journey for the match on 15 March. In the same month, the club's co-owner, actor Ryan Reynolds, pledged to the United Nations to "engage with and advocate" for sustainable goals aimed at making the sport more environmentally friendly. Wrexham have been approached for comment. The team were only on the plane for about 250 miles out of the almost 1,200-mile total trip, with the flight taking them from Hawarden Airport in Flintshire to Oxford. The jet flew from Jersey to Hawarden to pick the team up on 14 March, before flying to Oxford and returning to did the return journey the following day. Wrexham won the match 1-0 and are currently three points ahead of their promotion rivals, having played a game more. Wrexham took 16 flights domestic flights in their promotion season from the National League two years ago. Meanwhile, research from 2023 found Premier League clubs took 81 flights out of 100 games in a two-month period, with the shortest being 27 striker Paul Mullin's book, My Wrexham Story, he said flights became a regular occurrence after a royal visit to the Racecourse Ground left the team facing a five-hour coach journey close to kick off time. He said co-owner Rob McElhenney said the team could fly to all away matches more than two hours away by road. Of Wrexham's 23 League One opponents, only eight are within a two-hour drive. Criticism of the decision to fly to the match at Wycombe was posted on TikTok by campaign group Fossil Free Football, who said the club would have spent more than an hour on the road in trips to and from airports. Flights produce greenhouse gases - mainly carbon dioxide (CO2) - from burning fuel. These contribute to global warming when released into the 2023, private flights produced an estimated 15.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide - the equivalent of 3.7 million petrol cars being driven over the course of a year, - according to Free Football said: "No-one want this problem to get worse at any level, from grassroots where 120,000 matches a season are already cancelled, to professional football where we saw things like Wimbledon pitch collapsing after a heavy storm last year."The video also called Reynolds hypocritical for visiting the UN in New York to join Football for the Goals, a UN initiative aimed at making the sport more sustainable.
