It has been a great week for Forest Green Rovers — the Greenest Team in Sports. After flirting with relegation much of the season, the club assured itself of remaining in League Two, the 4th tier of English soccer/football, with two matches to play. And FGR was the subject of a short yet powerful video from the “YEARS Project.”
Management of Forest Green Rovers, almost universally acknowledged as The Greenest Team in Sports —it serves only vegan food to supporters and players alike and manicures its home pitch with a solar powered MoBot, among many other great, green things — realizes that the English soccer/football club’s ability to influence other sports teams and organizations on environmental issues in the future, is directly related to its performance on the pitch. The better it does, the higher up England’s football pyramid it reaches, the more media will cover FGR’s green story (#CoverGreenSports).
After a playoff win at London’s iconic Wembley Stadium last May earned FGR promotion from England’s 5th to the 4th division — the highest level it has ever reached in 125+ years of play. That led to more media coverage of the team and its sustainability story than ever before — GreenSportsBlog had been on this story since 2014 but suddenly, the ESPNs and The Guardians of the world were paying visits to the Forest Green’s New Lawn Stadium.
Thus, the pressure was intense to avoid going down, the fate that will be suffered by the last and next-to-last place teams in the 24 team league.
Thing is, newly-promoted teams, whether to the Premier League or to League Two, often struggle to “stay up” in their first season against much stiffer competition. FGR was no different, wallowing near the bottom of the table (standings) for much of the campaign. But a strong late season run pushed Forest Green Rovers above the drop zone and the team clinched safety with two games to go on April 24 with a 0-0 draw at Yeovil Town.
Members of Forest Green Rovers salute their traveling supporters after clinching safety from relegation in a 0-0 draw at Yeovil Town (Photo credit: Forest Green Rovers)
A couple of days later the, “YEARS Project,” an outgrowth of the outstanding, if not-nearly-viewed-enough climate change-themed documentary series “Years of Living Dangerously^,” went up on Facebook and YouTube with a short form (90 seconds) video that, despite (or maybe because of?) its brevity and no-narration style, tells the Forest Green Rovers story in eye-catching, memorable fashion. Check out the YouTube video here:
Here’s the link to the video on the YEARS Project’s Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/YearsOfLiving/videos/1714770931943291/
If you want to see other short-form, climate change-focused content, on a wide variety of topics, I heartily urge you to LIKE their Facebook page.
In the meantime, here’s hoping Forest Green Rovers’ Chairman Dale Vince and company continue to build the team’s quality so they can contend for promotion to 3rd tier League One in 2018-19. Which will result in even more coverage of the club’s green story.
^ If you haven’t watched Years of Living Dangerously, click here — it’s worth your time!
