Mitigating climate change in sports leagues: A scenario-based analysis of travel distances in women's and men's amateur soccer in Germany

Background: Travel to away games is a major but under-studied source of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in grassroots sport. We quantified these emissions and tested scheduling solutions that could make amateur soccer “climate-smart”. Methods: Match schedules for the 2022/23 season of 384 amateur women's and men's teams (35 groups from the 6 lowest leagues) in 3 German regions were geocoded. Baseline round-trip driving distances were calculated then converted to GHG equivalents (217 kg/100 km). Two optimization scenarios were modeled: (A) reallocating teams to geographically compact groups; (B) placing all teams in one league with an unbalanced schedule favoring nearby opponents. To generate near-optimal solutions, we used mixed-integer programming and custom heuristics. Results: Current scheduling required 156,558 km of travel (106.5–159.7 tons of GHG). Scenario A cut distance to 117,428 km (–25%), Scenario B to 101,333 km (–35%). League-level savings ranged from 2% to 57% (A) and 21% to 62% (B); the urban men's league achieved the largest absolute reduction (–20,853 km, –62%). In total, switching to Scenario B would save 37.5 to 56.4 tons of GHG compared to the current scheduling without reducing the number of matches. Conclusion: Simple, data-driven changes to group composition or match scheduling can substantially shrink the carbon footprint of grassroots soccer while maintaining competitive integrity. Sports federations can adopt such optimization tools to align league operations with planetary-health goals.