Presentation short abstract

Sport is increasingly cast as an urban biodiversity champion, yet a comparative multi-scalar study of three English Premier League clubs finds stadium actions are modest while training-ground expansion and sponsorship/resource relations displace biodiversity pressures to the urban edge and beyond.

Presentation long abstract

Sports organisations are increasingly positioned as biodiversity actors, purportedly able to mobilise publics, land, and capital. This paper examines what that looks like in practice through a comparative, multi-scalar case study of three London-based English Premier League (EPL) clubs.

The data comprise 103 systematically collected planning documents for stadium and training-ground developments, club press releases and sustainability reports, and a time-bounded corpus of media reporting. I use document analysis to map (1) club-led biodiversity initiatives, (2) the biodiversity consequences of stadium and training-ground development, and (3) sponsorship and resource relations (coded by sector and for any documented links to biodiversity initiatives).

Across cases, I find a recurring mismatch between the rhetorical scale of “biodiversity leadership” and the material scale of intervention (or lack thereof). Stadium-adjacent actions (green roofs, bat boxes, wildflower planting) are small and episodic. By contrast, training-ground expansion at the urban edge intensifies tensions over biodiversity loss in metropolitan green-belt landscapes and is negotiated through planning regimes, often via compensatory or offsetting logics.

Biodiversity pressures are further displaced through resource relations. High-impact operations, consumer marketing, and sponsorship portfolios (e.g., aviation, cruise shipping, fossil fuels) sit uneasily with “biodiversity leadership” claims and are therefore kept outside biodiversity-related debate. I argue that evaluating these “new conservation actors” requires accountability that extends beyond visible interventions around stadiums to include land-use change, finance, and the broader production of sporting entertainment.