EP01 Small steps, big leaps: Southampton FC

What should brands in the sports industry be doing for sustainability? 
We talk to David Thomas, Chief Commercial Officer at Southampton FC about the steps Saints are making on their sustainability journey, and how fan engagement is having a huge influence on their accountability. We discuss David’s goals for the future and opportunities in this critical area for brands in the sport industry in general.

Transcript

David      00:04 

If you do raise your head above the parapet you need to understand that you're going to be held to account and that's a good thing and that's not something that we should shy away from. 

Ant      00:28

Welcome to Small Steps Big Leaps episode one. I'm Ant Cox, head of strategy for Dragon Rouge London. For this first episode we’re in the world of sport, and the English Premier League to be precise. It’s one of the best leagues in the world. We've got some of the biggest and most forward-thinking clubs in the sport, with audiences of millions across the world. Its platform is huge and its influence could be even bigger. But what does sustainability actually mean in the modern game and how are clubs shaping themselves to be more sustainable on and off the pitch? What does good even look like? That's why I'm pleased to say that I'm joined today by David Thomas, chief commercial officer at Southampton football club. Hi David, how are you?

David      01:09

Hi Ant, yeah, I'm very good thank you.

Ant      01:12

Excellent. Thanks for joining me in what feels like a really timely conversation as the recently published Premier League sustainability rankings put your club third overall which certainly must have given you a good sense of pride.

David      01:28

Yes it did, and no doubt we’ll come and talk about that a little bit. I think we do need to be slightly mindful that everyone loves a league table, none more so than a football club, but we need to make sure that we're looking at that with our eyes wide open in terms of what it's telling us and what it's potentially not telling us. So yeah, a good set of results for us but a long journey ahead, I think.

Ant      02:04

Indeed, and I guess that's what everybody's going through outside of sport too. For lots of different organisations in lots of different sectors that word ‘journey’ is one of the biggest, and I think that's really what we wanted to do and explore: the journey that various different organisations and brands are on. I think one of the fascinating things is not all of the big commitments that people are making that feel quite far off, but the really tangible things that people are changing that are really making a difference and contributing towards that success in pushing people on that journey. I suppose the first question really that I have for you is around what you feel the biggest sustainability challenges are today in a football club?

David      02:59

Yeah, well there’s numerous, but I might just actually step out of the world of clubs for a second and just think about the challenges that sport faces overall. I think the fact that despite sport being integral to culture and popular culture, the way that the whole sports industry has been governed and run has remained pretty much static and stable for years and years until probably the last five or ten years, during which time we've seen just exponential change within the industry, just in terms of how sports consumed, how sports entities engage with their fanbases, but importantly how sports organisations are run. Managing any change in any organisation is difficult, as I’m sure you're aware, but I think specifically when it comes to sustainability one of the big challenges for clubs in particular, is it's been difficult to gain senior level buy in because for those at the top of those organisations it's difficult for them to see the benefit. Unfortunately, we all don't have the benefit of being able to create amazing new stadia like Tottenham have done recently, so most clubs are sitting on legacy stadia that are in some cases 100 years old, in our case 20 years old, but to turn even a 20 year old stadium into an efficient sustainable stadium is quite daunting in many ways. So, I think some boards of clubs in particular are looking at it, well this is potentially expensive, but equally they’re looking at it and going, well I don't really know where to start on this journey and we're going to use that word a lot I think in this session. I think that's probably the biggest challenge for those organisations, but I suppose in many ways that therein lies the opportunity as well. I think just taking a step back again from organisations, sports by its very nature engages a huge audience via a local one, or a national one, or even international one and there’s a real opportunity therefore for clubs and the whole industry to use that platform and position of responsibility to drive positive change and to lead by example - to educate, to inspire and engage people with this important message. In doing so there's also a secondary opportunity for clubs and all sports organisations which is to really start to behave like a modern consumer brand and organisation, and become a real employer of choice, as we're seeing now the demand and the challenges of recruiting new staff and retaining staff, sustainability is a fundamental element that could really play a part in that. But also, it's about attracting and retaining customers, gotta be careful with that word as a football club because of course when I say that word for us that means our fans, but all organisations need to engage in this space because it's what their staff want and it's what their customers want as well. So lots and lots of challenges but some huge opportunities as well.

Ant      06:52

Yeah exactly, the platform that clubs have and that sport has, that influence is huge and using it to be an influence for good and bring other people with you is that real potential, isn't it? But I guess one of the things that we find working with lots of different types of organisations, and talking about sustainability specifically, is that people define it in very different ways and kind of focus on it in very different ways. So, I guess my next question really is about how Southampton FC think about sustainability and organise yourselves around it?

David      07:36

Yeah, I think it's probably good to just give a potted overview of the journey we've been on for the last three years. It really started, for want of a better word, from the bottom up, where we started to really look at just basic operational initiatives that we can implement to protect the environment. So doing the stuff that you would expect us to do and what any organisation should be thinking about, but linked to what we touched on, as a leadership team at Saints we're very mindful of looking at things from a more strategic position and we’re really sensing that, and it's very clear not just in the world of sport but in society today, that people and everybody are demanding more from organisations large or small. Therefore, those organisations having a really clear sense of why they exist, beyond the relentless pursuit of profit is really important - profit’s OK and making money is OK, but it's how you go about it that people are really placing organisations under the spotlight. I suppose we had a sort of top down and bottom-up approach and where those two things meet in the middle led to our ambition, which is we want to be, as a football club, leading in all aspects of corporate behaviour and that’s important to our staff as we talked about, it's important to our players, to our fans, to our partners and the wider community. I guess where we then started was, we engaged a group - a steering group internally, but had senior level buy-in as part of the composition right from the start. We then embedded sustainability right in the heart of our club strategy, partly that's an element of wanting and needing, because of who we are as a club, to have a sustainable business model. But really starting to look at sustainability in all aspects we've broken that down into four key areas: it's of course our environmental responsibility and what we're doing to help protect the planet, but it's also about our corporate responsibility so really that's how we run a good business and how we treat everybody connected to the club equally and fairly. The third area is our social responsibility, so it's about how we’re a good citizen and how we connect with and give back to the community that we serve. And finally, it's our fan responsibility - so how are we engaging our fans, giving them a voice, listening to them, rewarding them, and engaging them in a way that makes them feel connected to the club. So we brought all of those four areas together, ultimately because everyone loves a model, don’t they? We thought, how do we wrap that up in one? and that's what led to the creation of what we call the Halo effect, which was launched in January last year. The Halo effect is taken from our - for those who don’t know Southampton football club, we’re nicknamed the Saints. We have a Halo as part of our crest which is all about doing the right thing. But the Halo effect also means the cumulative effect of all of our different initiatives in this space and the positive impact that we have overall , and we've brought that altogether, we’re taking it seriously, but really it's to define ‘this is how Saints does sustainability’. Two years ago in the Premier League sustainability league table we were sitting 18th, this time last year we'd risen to 6th, and as you've already touched on, this year delighted to say that we are now third in that league which doesn't mean that we're getting everything right by any means, but it definitely shows the progression I suppose.

Ant      12:10 

Yeah, what a difference a few seasons make.

David      12:13 

Indeed, yeh indeed.

Ant      12:15

I guess because that Halo effect, as you say, with the four different areas that you have as part of the model that brings it all together, it includes so many different types of initiatives and lots of different stories of success and progress. What would you say are the little steps of progress that you feel most proud of that have passed that whole?

David      12:48 

Yeah, I think too many to mention really, but let's just take one area. So, let's take the area of environmental responsibility. We do have for each of the four areas a sort of long-term objective, and in this space, it is to be carbon neutral by 2030 as many organisations are defining. Clearly to get to that point there's multiple elements of change that need to happen and we're doing a lot of the things that you would expect, but one of the first things that we needed to do when thinking about carbon neutrality was - well if we want to get to that point, actually, we've got to understand where we are today. So, we undertook a brilliant in-depth piece of research with Southampton University that helped to quantify our baseline emissions today. What that's now allowing us to do is go, OK, well we're building now a plan of carbon reduction modelling essentially, that covers everything from how we're reducing energy use - delighted to say that we now have 100% renewable energy source across both our stadium and training ground. It’s things like how we’re reducing our waste so we’re zero waste to landfill, we're reducing single use plastics with regards to carbon emissions, our ambition is to switch to 100% electric and hybrid vehicles overtime. So, we're doing a lot of initiatives in that space, but to be honest we almost think of those as hygiene factors because there’s things that we should be doing and that everybody should be doing. What we actually wanted to do though above that was for in each area of the four key areas we've created what we call a hero initiative, a hero Halo initiative even, just to make it even more difficult to say. So, in this space we wanted to create something unique and that becomes the thing that we really engage, we talk about in our communications, and we use to engage our staff and our fanbase. In this space with the environment, we've created the home-grown initiative. This is a carbon offsetting scheme, whereby every time an Academy player makes his or her first team debut, we plant 250 trees in the local region and at the same time we protect 250 trees overseas. And I’m delighted to say that since we started that initiative, we’ve planted 2000 trees both at our training ground but also in local schools and that's helping to offset 2000 tonnes of Co2 already. I think that's just one example of, OK, we're doing lots in this space, but actually what we found is that when we create something unique, like the home-grown initiative, people love that because actually that’s creating a platform to communicate with people but also it's creating an engagement platform for kids in the local community to engage with, and thereby it's really driving engagement and education at the same time.

Ant      16:30

Yeah, that’s great. I'm interested because when you were kind of putting together a steering committee and people to help guide where strategy was going to go, it was from across the club and lots of different parts of it. I think that's interesting because clearly sustainability - because it is so broad and because it touches so many different stakeholders and audiences, has to be owned by everybody. And I'm interested what feedback you've had, or what sort of levels of engagement you have from fans because as the lifeblood of any football club it's an important audience, but of course there are lots of things to communicate to fans and of course everybody is very engaged with on pitch performance and all of the rest of that. What level of engagement and interest have you had from fans around this whole topic?

David      17:28

Yeah, so one of the things interestingly as part of the Halo effect we've created something called Saints voice, which is essentially a fan panel that we engage with on a quarterly basis and on an ad hoc basis as required that represents the fanbase to the club and creates two-way communication. Really encouragingly that Saints voice and the fans engaged in that forum are passionate in this space around sustainability, but they're only representing their fan bases as well - their groups of fans, so the feedback that we're getting is that our fans are very highly engaged in this space. Interestingly, last week a YouGov survey was published. Again, another league table that sort of listed how Premier League clubs fanbases regard themselves within the environmental space - so they call them environmentalists - and interestingly Southampton football club came top of that league. I don't know if that's as a result of some of the work that we've been doing in this space making our fanbase more aware, or actually if they're just naturally like that. It's probably a combination of both, but either way I think the key thing is that they're interested in it, as are we, so actually there's a win-win here because we're now being able to really work together and start to hold each other to account in a way. A good example of that is after we launched the Halo effect last year, one of the first things shortly thereafter - I think almost the first match afterwards, Ralph Hasenhüttl, our manager was seen drinking from a single use plastic bottle on the side of the pitch and our fans quite rightly then started saying, well hang on a second, are you really driving the change? Are you really serious about this? I am delighted to now say that obviously Ralph is now drinking from a metal bottle, a much more sustainable solution, but that's great because if you do raise your head above the parapet you need to understand that you're going to held to account and that's a good thing and that's not something that we should shy away from.

Ant      20:22 

I think that’s really interesting. I guess there is an extra win here, isn't there, in the sense that when you can engage people and create relevance for the fanbase for example, making progress on the sustainability front can be just another source of pride or another way of showing that you're a modern progressive club both on and off the pitch. And I think that the pride that can come from that is actually a really interesting thing and we probably wouldn't have thought that five, ten years ago but it's certainly another real positive way that you can connect with fans or even deepen engagement with fans isn't it?

David      21:05

Yeah, I think it's just another example of where sports is just at that fulcrum of where - how best to describe this? Sports just reflects society at large doesn't it in many ways. So therefore it shouldn't be a surprise that our fanbase is highly engaged in this and wants clubs to be behaving in the right way, because that's what they're expecting of every organisation. It’s just because of who we are and the privileged position that we are in, and the league that we’re in, and the sport that we play, we’re even more in the spotlight, I suppose, but therefore an even greater opportunity for us to do the right thing and to lead by example as we have already touched on. But that's no different really to what every organisation should be thinking about big or small.

Ant      22:09

Yeah, absolutely. To almost wrap this up it would be interesting to know - because where we started here was that whole sense of progress and the journey and so on, and you kind of hinted at some of the end games like carbon neutrality by 2030 and so on - I'd be interested to know what you'd like to be able to say in a year from now, for example about the progress you've made. When we're thinking in that shorter term, what are the ambitions for the near future around sustainability topics?

David      22:52

Yeah, I suppose for me I'd love to be able to say in a year’s time and demonstrate that we've continued to move forward, and we've taken greater steps on our journey. Just thinking really basically with the home-grown initiative, if I'm able to say in a year’s time that we've planted more trees, that means more academy graduates are making their first team debuts which is fantastic news for us as Southampton FC. So, more trees please would be great! I think I've already touched on things like reducing single use plastics. To get to 0 is actually really challenging for a sports organisation for a number of reasons, but I would absolutely love to be in that place. One of the things I often get asked is how engaged our players are in this space because of course they have a really key role to play in helping to drive things forward and engage fan bases and lead by example. Obviously with lockdown it's been really difficult over the last two years to do that, albeit actually our players have been highly supportive of the Halo effect overall, but I'd love to be able to say and demonstrate in a year’s time how our players are really getting even more involved now that limitations on their access are beginning to wane, which is good. But ultimately where we want to get to as an organisation and as a club, is that we want to get to a place where sustainability in all of its guises is just embraced and embedded fully across the culture of the organisation. A win for us is going to be when everyone in the club is making informed sustainability decisions just as part of their business as usual, where it just comes naturally, and I think we're slowly getting to that place which is great. It's taken a while to get to that point, but already I'm seeing examples across the club where people naturally, just off their own bat, are beginning to make decisions through the lens of sustainability and that's a huge win because that’s starting to point towards cultural change being fully embedded. So, if we can get to that point then that would be fantastic.

Ant      25:40

Absolutely. I think the Halo effect is a lovely thing. I think that as an example for other organisations, in or outside of sport, it's a nice example of how you can make something cohesive to talk about your views on sustainability and your values that has lots of really lovely constituent elements, from the initiatives like home-grown to some great facts like zero waste to landfill. I think those sorts of things really stand out as being quite significant and sometimes even really unexpected, but I think it's a really nice idea, it's nicely branded, it certainly links to your values, and I think it really makes it an engaging piece. I actually really enjoyed reading the reports. Often I can’t say that about sustainability reports that still really end up being quite dense and technical, when actually it's engaging to everybody as a topic, so why not make it that way? I think that was a good example.

David      26:53

Yeah, I think again a question that I get asked a lot is something that we sort of touched on right at the beginning, which is where to start, particularly now given that sustainability is becoming just such a standard part of the agenda for every organisation. For those that aren’t already on the journey it can feel quite overwhelming and quite daunting, I think. But my answer is always the same, which is, well first of all not that we've done things perfectly at all, but the key thing is just start. Start somewhere. Every journey starts with a first step, and what we're finding, and I think what all organisations will find, is that as long as you're starting to engage in this space people don't expect you to be perfect, nobody is ever perfect and we’re never going to get to a point where actually we've reached our end goal because there's always going to be something further to reach for. But just start somewhere and start small and then build it out from there, and actually you'll find that overtime it becomes like, I guess a snowball rolling down the hill, and it'll start to build a bit and build its own momentum.

Ant      28:15

Yeah, exactly. Well thanks David for joining us. It's been great to chat and great to hear a little bit more about what's going on and I wish you lots of luck for the rest of the season both on and off the pitch.

David      28:28

Thanks Ant. Take care, bye.