We remade the Premier League table for sustainability

Same 20 clubs, different rules: scored on the environmental evidence anyone can check. And Manchester United's carbon footprint is a photograph.

The Premier League season kicked off this weekend. One table was already decided.

We spent the past week doing what any supporter can do. Club websites. Annual reports. Companies House. SEC filings. No insider access, no paid data. The test was simple: can an ordinary person find out what their club emits?

Manchester United's carbon footprint is a photograph.

United - among the most valuable clubs in England, listed on the New York Stock Exchange - files a long annual report with US regulators. We searched it. Emissions figures found: none. The only published carbon numbers sit in the club's UK accounts at Companies House, filed as a scan. A picture of a page. The figures aren't available as searchable text, and there is no text layer for a screen reader to speak. You can look at the page. The internet cannot look back.

That is not "no disclosure." It is disclosure that cannot travel. The same club publishes a fully readable annual report for Wall Street; its emissions exist only as an image for everyone else. On SINK's scale that is a 25: some operational emissions, no usable full inventory. Not the empty set. Not a number you can check.

United is not the exception. It is the shape of the league.

The table

We scored all 20 clubs on the same ten questions we use for every company in the database - same rubric, public evidence only, published whether clubs engage or not.

What does the score mean? Every company SINK assesses answers the same ten questions, each scored 0-10, covering its carbon footprint and supply chain, trajectory, energy, nature, waste, water, targets, transparency, and controversies. Those answers drive 70% of the final score; the other 30% reflects the inherent impact of the company's industry, so a football club and an oil company are marked on the same paper but not from the same starting line. We only count evidence a member of the public can access without contacting the company, and "readable" means what it sounds like: text a human and a search engine can both read. Partial disclosure earns partial credit. Full methodology and every source are on each club's scorecard.

You can check their numbers
Full inventory published, readable by anyone.

Partial picture
Operations only - no usable supply chain or fan travel figures.

No usable public inventory
No publicly accessible emissions inventory we could score.

Small gaps are not rankings. The three clubs on 56 are level. The line that matters runs across the whole table: five clubs publish figures you can actually check. Fifteen do not.

That is the finding. Most of the Premier League is not being marked down for how much it emits. It is being marked down because nobody outside the club can see the number.

And a score in the fifties is progress, not a trophy. Nobody in this league ranks among the leaders in our wider database. The five clubs at the top are there because they publish enough public evidence to be assessed properly - which is the start of the job, not the end of it.

What the League asked for, and what this table measures

These are not the same thing, and pretending they are would make the table weaker.

Every Premier League club signed the League's Environmental Sustainability Commitment. One of its measures was to develop a greenhouse gas emissions dataset covering Scopes 1, 2 and 3 - broadly, emissions from the club's own operations and from its wider value chain - by the end of last season. That deadline passed when the season ended on 24 May. For a football club, the wider picture can include supply chains and supporter travel, depending on where each club draws its reporting boundary.

The Commitment does not, on the League's own wording, require that dataset to be published, searchable, or readable. A club can meet the letter of it in a shared drive. SINK does not score shared drives. We score what a member of the public can find and check.

So this is not a compliance prosecution. It is a visibility table. If a club built the dataset and locked it away, it will look identical to a club that built nothing. That is the point of an open score.

Coventry City, Hull City and Ipswich Town were in the Championship last season, so that clock was never theirs. They are in this table because they are in this league now, and the rubric does not change for a newcomer. They sit at the bottom because we could not find a usable inventory - not because they missed a deadline that never applied to them.

The best document in the league was in the attic

Tottenham's score has a story.

When we first assessed them, their most complete emissions document - a fuller breakdown than any other club's - was gone from their website. Dead link. We recovered it from the Internet Archive, the non-profit that keeps copies of the web before they disappear.

The best emissions disclosure in the Premier League currently survives because of a digital library's attic.

The recovered document moved Spurs from 37 to the top of the table. Then we did to our own scoring what we invite every club to do to theirs: we challenged it, question by question, against the standard applied to everyone else. The audit brought it to 53. It cut the highest score in the table. That is what should make you trust the rest of it.

One footnote, which changes nothing in the ranking: in that document, the stated total and its parts are 263 tonnes apart. Their arithmetic, not ours. It is noted on their scorecard. And in later reporting the club still publishes a supporter-travel figure, but holds it outside the boundary used for net-zero progress. The number has not disappeared; its place in the boundary has changed.

The biggest number is you

For the clubs that publish a full picture, the largest single source is not the stadium, the team flights, or the shirts. It is the crowd.

In the Tottenham document we scored, supporter travel was 44,558 tonnes - more than half of everything beyond the club's own operations, and close to half of the whole footprint in that document. Liverpool cut almost every line in their latest report; the supporter-travel line rose while almost every other line fell. A rising number here is not automatically failure - better counting often makes a number bigger before it makes it smaller. But you cannot cut a line you refuse to print.

If you went to a match this weekend, you were not watching your club's carbon footprint. You were in it. Clubs do not control how every supporter gets to the ground. They do control whether that fact appears in public. The ones that write it down are the only ones that can be asked, in public, what they intend to do about it.

What changed this weekend, and what didn't

The visible story of this season is on the shirt. Gambling brands are off the front for the first time in over twenty years - a voluntary restriction agreed by the clubs, not a ban on every betting logo in the ground. Everyone can see it.

The story that determines whether football's environmental claims can be scrutinised is the one above - and nobody can see it. We do not score the shirts. We score the evidence.

On the evidence, the league's brightest story this weekend is Brentford. Their publicly readable emissions inventory puts them five points behind the three clubs at the top of this table. Showing your working is worth more than a brochure.

Newcastle's accounts say a full footprint is "currently being calculated." Other clubs have reports due. Any of the bottom fifteen can become checkable as soon as the numbers exist in a format a human and a search engine can read. The score follows the evidence. It does not follow the badge.

The table will move

The football season runs until May. This table does not have to wait that long.

Our methodology is open. Every source on every scorecard is cited. A club that thinks we have them wrong can challenge the score with evidence - including promoted clubs with numbers we did not find, and clubs whose filings we could not machine-read.

Publish the number. Make it readable. The score follows.

SINK scores companies 0-100 on publicly available environmental evidence - the same ten questions for a football club as for a bank. All 20 club scorecards are live now: /premier-league.

Think your club's score is wrong? Good. Challenge it.