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“For me, it’s not about football. It’s about player welfare. Seeing the levels of smoke, myself breathing it in while I’m just standing here …. If you’ve got a referee coming up to me saying ‘keep an eye on the ones who have asthma’, that’s when I don’t want us to play.”
Western Sydney Wanderers head coach Dean Heffernan did not mince his words after his side’s round seven match against Canberra United. His comments reflect a question that has become more common – and more urgent – among Australia’s sporting community as the country’s bushfire crisis worsens: how bad must things get before something is done?
It feels awkward, pointless even, to talk about sport in times like these. Our televisions and social media feeds have become montages of towering flames engulfing towns and bushland; major cities deserted under films of grainy, yellow smoke; carcasses of native wildlife, blackened and stiff, found among the ash; firefighters collapsing on the road.
For so long, sport has been the place to which we escape from the problems of the wider world; a sort of never-ending blockbuster film whose rules and plots and characters distract us from our own. But the last few months have shattered that illusion. Every sporting code is now reckoning with the same existential threat that confronts us all: how do we adapt to a deteriorating climate? How reliable or appropriate are our old measures and habits? What kind of changes are necessary to ensure our survival?
The 2019-20 football season has been an apt metaphor for the way summer sport generally is trying to cope with the climate crisis.
As summers have become more hazardous in recent years, Football Federation Australia has developed policies to ensure the safety of players, officials and spectators. An official heat policy, which uses the globally-recognised Wet Bulb Globe Temperature index and, more recently, an air quality index to assess air pollution produced by bushfire smoke have been employed. This latter policy is borrowed from the AFC; so unprecedented are current conditions that the governing body hasn’t needed to develop its own air quality policy until now.
However, these indexes have not always been the most reliable measure of how hot weather or air pollution affects athletes, coming under fire as recently as six months ago by Fifpro, the world players’ union.
And while climate change does not discriminate, it is often women’s football that bears the brunt of these unreliable measures. Not only are women’s games usually scheduled earlier in the day to account for men’s games played during more lucrative broadcast slots (particularly for double-headers), but the under-supported nature of women’s competitions means players don’t always have access to the medical equipment or resources that could curb the effects of extreme heat or pollution during training and games.
The W-League and the NWSL in the US, held during the summer, are two leagues where players are most at risk. In 2017, Houston Dash and England international Rachel Daly collapsed with a heat-related illness after temperatures reached over 32 degrees when their game kicked off at 3:00pm.
In the W-League the same year, FFA was criticised for allowing a late-January game to go ahead in extreme heat at 2:00pm. Even though the WGBT index technically gave it the go-ahead, the heat was so oppressive there were two hydration breaks in each half – one every 15 minutes. Former Sydney FC player Kyah Simon told a radio station afterwards that she believed some of her teammates had heatstroke.
As the current season is showing, the W-League’s earlier scheduling means it is more prone to climate disruption. Adjusted for season length and time of year, the W-League has 19 summer games that kick off at 4:00pm or earlier, compared with the A-League that has 12 in the same period.
Three W-League games have already been delayed or postponed this season due to extreme weather (with three more fixtures in doubt based on forecasts). Four of those six games were scheduled to kick off at 5:00pm or earlier.
The A-League has not experienced any official disruption this season, though several games have gone ahead in questionable conditions – including two this past weekend. Given the current situation, it is safe to assume that scheduling disruptions (or the threat of them) will continue this season in both competitions.
Australia’s “summer of sport” is no longer cause for celebration – it serves as a warning. Extreme weather periods will become more common and more dangerous as the new decade unfolds, prompting questions over whether football continues with a summer calendar.
Games can be rescheduled only so often before attendances are blunted and, as players, coaches and commentators continue to note, the measures used to determine whether matches go ahead are not always reliable indicators of appropriate conditions.
Moving the game back to a winter season as part of a structural overhaul would see football forced to compete with Australia’s biggest codes, but it may be a risk worth taking when the gravity of the current situation is considered. And with the still-fledgling W-League standing to suffer the most, we must ask again: how bad must things get before something is done?
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