IT IS A question that many English football fans must ask when they scan the weekly results: where the hell is Forest Green? The question has got more urgent as Forest Green Rovers have risen to the top of League Two (the fourth tier of the English game) and look set to be promoted at the end of the season.
The team is based in the small town of Nailsworth in Gloucestershire and was founded way back in 1889. But its rise in professional football is down to the involvement of Dale Vince, a green entrepreneur who took responsibility for the club’s debts in 2010 and became the chairman. Mr Vince made his money from wind farms; he was the founder of Ecotricity, a green-energy supplier. And he has brought his philosophy to the sport as well.
Forest Green has been described as the greenest football club in the world by FIFA and was the first to be certified by the UN as carbon neutral. There are solar panels on the stadium roof and the rest of the power comes from one of Ecotricity’s windmills, which is only five miles away. The club’s car park has electric charging points so that supporters can recharge their vehicles when they are watching the match. The groundskeeping equipment is electric and no artificial fertiliser is used on the pitch at the appropriately named New Lawn stadium. The players’ shirts are made from coffee grounds and recycled plastic.
When Mr Vince took over, he resolved to stop serving meat to the players and the club only serves vegan food. This doesn’t mean that the players can’t eat meat at home but does mean that the food they get on match days and at training sessions is from a vegan menu. Mr Vince says that several players have become fully vegan after joining the club, because of the health benefits. So far, no player has refused to join because of the policy.
Clearly, the approach has not cramped Forest Green’s success on the pitch. The club has an up-and-coming young coach in Rob Edwards who was previously in charge of the England under-16 squad. Before Good Friday’s round of matches, with just six games still to play, Forest Green had a five-point lead and had scored more goals, and conceded fewer, than any other team in the division. The finances are in good shape too; Mr Vince says the club has been profitable for the past five years and its philosophy has attracted sponsors like Oatly, a non-lactose milk company, and Innocent, which sells fruit smoothies.
In the longer term, however, the club will have to grow if it is to climb further up the league. Its average home crowds are 2,000-3,000 and that is hardly surprising; Nailsworth has a population of only 5,000 and Stroud, the nearest “big” town, is home to fewer than 35,000. So Mr Vince is planning to build a new stadium near junction 13 on the M5 motorway and within easy reach of Gloucester and north Bristol. True to form, the site will also include a green-tech business park, and will be built completely out of wood. He hopes that the site (which has outline planning consent) will be ready in three to four years. A new stadium will be necessary if Forest Green wants to meet the ground conditions for the second tier in professional football, the Championship.
And it is not just the club that plans to be going places. Mr Vince says he is looking for a new owner for Ecotricity so that he can switch to another career: politics. Although you might expect him to be a Green Party supporter, he actually backs Labour: only two parties in Britain, he says, have any hope of being elected. It sounds like a quixotic task. But already, in both business and sport, Mr Vince has shown he is not merely tilting at windmills.■