A mock football match staged outside Barclays’ flagship Piccadilly Circus branch has turned the floodlights on the bank’s cynical exploitation of the beautiful game.
Barclays proudly boasts of its status as Official Banking Partner of the Premier League and sponsorship of the FA Women’s Super League. But away from the terraces, the bank is ploughing billions into fossil fuels that puts it all at risk.
Tifo Football’s video, Will Your Football Club Be Underwater in 2050? explains how accelerating climate change, driven by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, is on track to flood grounds, create impossibly hot playing conditions, and disrupt major sporting fixtures around the world in other ways as already witnessed with the 2019 Rugby World Cup and the 2019 Australian Tennis Open. And yet, despite its purported support for football, Barclays is pouring more money into fossil fuels than any other bank in Europe.