How can we play when our field is burning?

Is this the year the climate crisis hits sports head on?

On Monday night, the Los Angeles Rams won a home playoff game. In Arizona.

The raging LA wildfires forced the NFL to move that game, an obvious decision and a circumstance for which the league has contingency plans, which you can read all about here—it’s quite an undertaking. It’s also the first time in almost 90 years the league has moved a playoff game. And there’s a good reason for that hesitance.

Football, especially today, is a business worth tens of billions of dollars annually in betting markets. And while every bookmaker has their own valuations, all of them agree that having a raucous crowd cheering for one side is worth somewhere between 1-3 points per game. That’s enough to swing a game on occasion—though obviously not Monday night’s—and certainly enough to swing millions of dollars in point spreads.

It’s impactful enough that most major bookmakers took a pretty unusual step of voiding bets that had been placed on the game by bettors assuming it would be played in Los Angeles. This is not intended in any way to mitigate the utter devastation of the homes and property lost in the fires, just to explain that it’s a huge financial headache for a league that … generally doesn’t like those. Nobody in sports likes those. But they’re coming.

The day-to-day impact of the climate crisis on sports is really only beginning. This is a piece in which my favourite distraction collides headlong with the thing it is usually distracting me from. And it sucks—but I promise you I am not alone in confronting this.

Tampa Herald Tribune

That there above would be the stadium the Tampa Rays will NOT be playing baseball at this coming season. Tropicana Field’s roof was ripped to shreds by Hurricane Milton last October. It will take at least a season to fix—and yeah, millions upon millions of dollars, obviously.

In the meantime, the Rays will play at the spring training facility of the New York Yankees, Steinbrenner Stadium. It seats about 11,000 people, which would make it the smallest stadium used as a home field for a major league baseball team since the Toronto Blue Jays were forced to play in Buffalo due to pandemic border restrictions. Now the Rays don’t tend to attract too many fans, so maybe 11,000 is a Goldilocks-size stadium for them. But it’s definitely not their home, with their facilities. And should the Rays have a good year and end up hosting MLB playoff games … who knows what happens then?

And yeah, this is just the beginning. Very few sports will be safe in the years to come. Here’s a few random examples you can ignore as one-offs if you are a sports fan determined not to be distracted:

• While the football game was the only LA game to move locations, NHL and NBA games scheduled for Los Angeles have been postponed.

• The Australian Open, being played right now in the increasingly scorching heat of summer Down Under, has increasingly had to adapt an Extreme Heat Policy that postpones matches or moves them to the evening. The U.S. Open has had to figure out similar contingencies.

• While NHL games are played in climate controlled rinks, hockey is a Northern sport, beloved in Canada, where the backyard rinks the greats grew up playing on are disappearing rapidly.

• Baseball has had to postpone several games in recent years due to air quality conditions from wildfire smoke, even when the fires in question are hundreds of kilometres from the site of the game.

• Finally, historic golf courses in areas in paths of increasingly bigger storms will be particularly vulnerable , because you can’t just…replant trees at Augusta National easily, for instance.

I could go on, but I won’t because it’s depressing. And because you’ll have more examples soon enough.

So my question for 2025 is if there’s a tipping point. Not a tipping point that will cancel sports, or change climate policy—lol, people are dying and losing everything weekly and we’re still a ways away from that—but a point at which people who love sports can no longer ignore what our own destruction of the ecosystem is doing to the games they love.

Is there a point at which the leagues themselves begin to realize what they are in for, and change their policies and advocacy accordingly? Money talks, after all. I didn’t start this with NFL betting implications for nothing, y’know?

Every time a game is moved or postponed, it costs the league and the teams involved millions. It costs advertising partners who paid for space in one place a lot of problems. And because where a game is played impacts bets, and no bookie wants to void bets that have already been placed, the all-important gambling partners get scared.

I know we’re very much used to moments of silence for victims opening American sporting events, usually in the wake of a mass shooting or similar tragedy… but when those becomes routine? When dozens of baseball games every summer are played in random places at random dates because the other places are burning? When ticket buyers begin to read the fine print to make sure they’ll get their money back rather than simply have to hold the ticket for a random date TBA? When a team loses a big game after it couldn’t practice because it wasn’t safe to be outside in the days leading up to it? What about when an arena burns down?

Sports is very, very good at paying lip service and moving on, as long as the leagues and teams and advertisers aren’t losing too much money while they do it. Sports fans are very good at compartmentalizing, at tuning in for a much-needed break from disaster anxiety. Advertisers are very good at throwing a few bucks at the victims as long as the bread and circuses continue. But what happens when the circus is on fire?