There are few things English football supporters need less than another lecture about how they should travel to matches.
Take the train, clubs tell them. Leave the car at home. Think about the planet. All perfectly reasonable advice until a Saturday fixture becomes a Sunday 4.30pm kick-off, engineering works close half the railway or the last service home departs somewhere around half-time.
This is where Swiss football has come up with an idea worth stealing.
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In September 2025, the Swiss Football League launched a car-sharing platform covering clubs across its top two divisions. Supporters travelling to home or away games can select a fixture, offer spare seats or find somebody already driving their way. Pick-up points can be added en route. The league, working with StadiumGO and Toyota, then added the part football understands particularly well: prizes.
The most active users have been offered VIP and standard match tickets, signed shirts, match balls and other rewards. After what the league described as a successful first Carpooling Challenge, it extended the scheme through the remainder of the 2025-26 season.
The Premier League should be paying attention.
At first glance, car-sharing might appear a strange sustainability initiative to import into English football. This is, after all, a country with a healthy culture of travelling to games by train. Away-day railway carriages filled with supporters are as much a part of the landscape as motorway service stations and overpriced station pints.
The objective should certainly not be to coax those supporters back into cars.
Yet the scale of car use remains substantial. A 2025 Trainline report estimated that almost one in five UK adults make football journeys lasting more than an hour each year, amounting to 34 million round trips. More than half are made by car. Encouragingly, 83 per cent of supporters surveyed said they would consider switching to rail.
Rail should therefore remain the priority. Car-sharing fills the rather large hole marked: what happens when the train doesn’t work?
English football is unusually good at creating that problem for itself. Under the Premier League’s current broadcast arrangements, more than half of the competition’s 380 matches are moved away from the traditional Saturday afternoon slot. The Football Supporters’ Association argue that late changes can make public transport unavailable and push more supporters towards cars, undermining football’s attempts to reduce its environmental impact.
Anyone who regularly attends away matches knows the calculation. Is there a train after the final whistle? Can you reach the station in time? What happens if the match runs long? Is there a replacement bus somewhere outside Crewe? At a certain point the car stops being the environmentally undesirable option and becomes the only realistic one.
Did you know, 100,000 tonnes of sportswear ends up in landfill every year in the UK alone?
The Swiss scheme accepts that reality rather than pretending it can be wished away. If four supporters are going to drive from Manchester to Bournemouth anyway, the environmental question is whether they arrive in one car or four. A Premier League car-sharing platform could allow a supporter driving to a particular fixture to advertise spare seats through a trusted league or club system. Other ticket-holders could search by location, arrange a suitable pick-up point and share the cost.
Football being football, incentives would help. Loyalty points, ticket-ballot priority, merchandise discounts or hospitality competitions could reward regular participation, much as the Swiss league has used tickets, signed shirts and match balls. It is behaviour change through the rather more persuasive medium of possibly getting something nice.
Importantly, this should sit below public transport in the hierarchy rather than compete with it.
Trainline’s figures suggest there is enormous appetite for greater rail use if football and the railway can remove some of the obstacles. Flexible tickets that remain valid when fixtures are rescheduled, matchday discounts and special services for difficult kick-off times would all attack the problem closer to its source. The FSA has called for a 12-week minimum notice period for league fixtures and flexible football rail tickets tied to matches rather than specific dates.
But there will always be journeys for which rail is impractical. Rural supporters have to reach stations in the first place. Sunday services can be limited. Evening kick-offs create last-train problems. Engineering works have an uncanny ability to materialise precisely when 3,000 people need to travel from one end of England to another. A shared car is not zero-carbon transport. It is simply better than several half-empty ones.
And supporter travel matters. UEFA have published new guidance for measuring spectator-travel emissions, developed alongside the Premier League, Germany’s DFL and France’s LFP. UEFA describe supporters travelling to and from matches as one of the largest sources of carbon emissions associated with football events and specifically recommend incentives that encourage lower-carbon journeys.
The Premier League, then, already understands the problem. They have even helped develop a system for measuring it.
The next step is doing something with the numbers.
There is an awkwardness here that English football cannot avoid. Clubs and leagues can encourage supporters to make greener choices while the sport itself continues making those choices harder. Premier League teams took at least 116 flights to domestic away matches in 2024-25, according to research by the Carbon Boot campaign, covering an estimated 40,000 miles.
Asking a Newcastle supporter to carefully calculate the lowest-carbon route to a rearranged Monday night fixture becomes a tougher sell if the players are boarding a plane for theirs.
Copying Switzerland would not fix that contradiction. Nor would car-sharing transform football’s environmental footprint by itself.
But it would recognise something important. Sustainability works better when it accommodates how supporters actually live rather than demanding perfect behaviour from them.
Keep people on trains wherever possible. Make those trains cheaper, more reliable and compatible with football’s chaotic scheduling. Provide coaches and buses where they aren’t.
And when somebody really does have to drive, there is no good reason for three empty seats to travel with them.
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