The Lionesses’ positive legacy risks being undermined by support for a fossil fuel profiteer
Written by Rosa Simanowitz
England’s back-to-back Euros winners have inspired thousands of girls and young people in my generation to get into sport. The players are not only role models on the pitch but have stood up for inclusivity and social justice off it.
But the win for the team is also a PR victory for its sponsor, Chase, the retail banking arm of the world’s biggest funder of fossil fuels, the US giant JP Morgan Chase. The kids celebrating England’s victory are the ones who will have to live with the dark consequences of the bank’s decisions; because it has poured US$192 billion into polluting projects since 2021. That was the year in which experts warned that we could only keep global heating to 1.5C with no new oil and gas development.
The sad reality is that the health, wellbeing and future of my generation is being sold off for the benefit of fossil fuel profiteers like JP Morgan Chase, and the Lionesses, thanks to the FA’s sponsorship choices, are tainted by association.
It’s especially bizarre because grassroots football won’t do well in a world with much more flooding rain and intense summer heatwaves. We want more young girls to get into football, but too many families risk being frozen out by the high price of participation, often linked to the costs clubs face in dealing with ever-worsening extreme weather.
The Lionesses have earned their glowing reputation with wonderful performances and a commitment to improving access to football. But the FA’s choice of sponsorship partner means their legacy risks being twisted to benefit an institution whose planet heating activities are actually undermining the progress being made.
I’m convinced that it won’t be long before we look back with amazement (and disgust) at old images of leading players from this era being used to promote fossil fuels. Just as it's hard for us now to imagine that anyone ever thought that having marketing messages from big tobacco all over sport was acceptable, people will ask themselves, “they knew the harm being caused by these companies, the warnings were loud and clear. Why didn’t anyone put a stop to this sooner?”.
The truth is that the end of pro-smoking sponsorships only came after health experts and campaigners raised the alarm for years. Big, powerful companies will not be pushed out of sport quietly, even though they totally understand the harm that they’re doing. Fortunately, even some players are joining fans in taking action, with penalty-scoring hero Niamh Charles last year signing onto an open letter to FIFA, alongside more than 130 other pros, calling for it to drop its sponsor Saudi Aramco, the world’s biggest oil company.
And it’s not just JP Morgan Chase that is using women’s football to clean up a questionable reputation. Barclays has been a title sponsor of the Women’s Super League for years, even as it invests more in fossil fuels than any other European bank and is tied to the mass killing of innocent children in Palestine. If sports organisations did the right thing, and dropped these sponsors, it would send a powerful message that institutions must do better if they want their brand up in lights alongside our treasured teams.
Women’s football is growing in an amazing way, but it had to fight to get to this point. Losing sight of the values of positive impact and inclusion that make it special would be a betrayal of the original pioneers who had to struggle for recognition for so long. Now, happily, the game is bigger than ever, and the future looks bright. But that’s also a golden opportunity for antisocial companies to slide in and wrap their brand around players admired all around the country. I say that there’s just no need to rely on funding from toxic sponsors.
Sport makes the world a better place, it gives us amazing feelings of belonging, joy and final-winning euphoria you don’t get anywhere else. It has also been a leading force in creating a fairer and more inclusive society. But too often, its true impact is darker than meets the eye, because our teams are choosing to promote brands that don’t share the values of them or their fans. Let’s deliver the positive legacy that our Lionesses deserve, and drop a sponsor that seems set on selling out my generation for fossil fuel profits.
Rosa Simanowitz is a 17 year old football fan from Brighton who founded “Tell the WSL”, a campaign against Barclays’ women’s football sponsorship.
