Stadium Recycling: Engineer’s Waste Cleanup

If you go to the football league at the weekend, notice the special cleaning events in the stadiums. Players and fans will be involved. And legends too. European champion Antonín Panenka, the author of the famous penalty kick, is also the face of the Sport without waste project focused on sustainability.

“He’s called a pioneer of recycling,” smiles Martin Šlapák, member of the ESG group of the League Football Association (LFA), manager of the Tipsport group and its foundation. “When he was trying his famous penalty, he hung plastic bottles under the crossbar that he was hitting.”

It will also be about plastic in the 18th round of the football league. “Annually, 75 tons of waste are produced in the stadiums of the first league, and 75 percent is not sorted,” Šlapák looks at the computer records.

He raises his eyebrows in warning and rushes in with a quick solution: “The easiest is to introduce returnable cups. Not all stadiums have them. You’ll reduce plastic waste by up to 80 percent.”

Before moving on to other topics and improvements on how to reduce football’s environmental impact, such as the carbon footprint of fan travel, or water management, allow a small digression. First of all, it is appropriate to introduce the passionate manager. “I’m not an eco-terrorist, I’m not going to stick to the asphalt in front of stadiums,” jokes an energetic 38-year-old man with an engaging story. “But the environment matters and the world of football is the perfect place for clubs and players to lead by example.”

He is not unknown to many fans. The last name alone caught his attention when he first entered the league at the age of eighteen in his parent club Příbram.

Remember the bachelor with the blond heel?

Šlapák was not a sharp back who indulged in fouls, on the contrary, he was in charge of scoring goals. He was at his best when he was twenty-five, in 2012 he even broke the league record for the longest goal streak.

He was fast, tireless, always attacking the defenders, in short, a hard worker, on whom coach David Vavruška liked to bet at the point next to Tomáš Wágner. Lukáš Pleško mainly supplied them with great passes with his left foot. “Even for the goal against Sparta, he crossed beautifully for me,” Šlapák tells Seznam Zprávy.

He still remembers how Vavruška let out a long pre-match speech at Letná. He just came into the booth, skipped the tactical instructions this time and went around each player asking, “Are you scared?”

He pasted the list on the board and left.

“We looked at each other to see what was going on,” smiles Šlapák. “You know all the players shook their heads, but we were nervous.”

The fearless performance and the 2:0 win at Letná shocked the Spartans in particular.

And so it went from time to time. The unstoppable striker hit six rounds in a row. He established himself against Mladá Boleslav, Dukla, Sparta, Jablonec, Olomouc and Český Budějovice.

He was only the eighth player in the history of the league to achieve this, only the gunners Horst Siegl and David Lafata had a better record.

Šlapák could match them in the next match at Bohemians in Ďolíček. Příbram attacked the fourth place, she was in the caliber. Before entering the pitch, one of the journalists in the tunnel reminded Šlapák that there was a shooting milestone in the game.

“I don’t know if he dumped me,” she muses in retrospect.

In the 80th minute, he had the seventh goal in a row on the boot. It seemed like a done deal. Glory, an unforgettable feat. Not enough was enough. Pleško again sent a beautiful cross into the box with his left foot, the goalkeeper Sňozík unexpectedly ran past it. The kicker was alone in front of an empty gate on a small patch of land.

“Suddenly, the ball jumped on my shin and bounced on the corner flag. I was announced as the Hoof of the Wheel at Nova tonight,” he tells how a beautiful series can also end.

At that time, he had no idea that his playing career would slowly end in the next year. When he also scored against Sparta, he had the feeling that now things will go by themselves, that he will move to a bigger club. Agent Zdenek Nehoda received offers, but none came through.

“It’s an edge that didn’t tip over to transfer, but to normal life,” he says. “I discovered that you still live in a bubble. There is professional football and the world around you that eluded me. I did not have the quality to play in Sparta or Slavia. I told myself that I would go with the football requirements lower, but with something higher. So I started studying.”

He still tried to play in Slovakia and lower competitions in the Czech Republic, he scored goals again in Králové Dvór, but with teammate Jiří Saba, a sports manager heading to Zbrojovka, only for thirst.

Before he was thirty, he bravely threw himself into the University of Economics in Prague.

He had a head even with the fervent support of his mistress in the scripts. While people in Příbram continued to stop him on the street for a long time with constantly repeating questions:

He replied, “I joined a company focused on recycling car batteries.”

He traded the playground for heavy industry. As a manager, he led the ESG project and was also in charge of the quality management department. He reduced the energy requirements of the processes and saw the results. “So it was very fulfilling for me. It was there that I first understood the meaning of data, processes and long-term change,” he recounts. “When I stopped playing professional football, you’re looking for yourself and the industry has always attracted me,” explains the step into the darkness that you wouldn’t expect from a footballer.

Now, thanks to the Sport without waste project, he has connected his passions together. He returned to football.

“It’s taking slow steps forward, but we’re still at the beginning compared to Europe. We see clubs working with waste and water with the help of our project,” he is pleased with the gradual steps. “In Spain, Germany, England, sustainability in professional clubs is at a high level. We still lack a systemic approach, which is being worked on now.”

In Germany, sustainability requirements are part of the licensing process, clubs must have returnable cups. “The aim should be for us to have that as well. I think next year there will be an LFA sustainability strategy that will frame it all,” the next shift is looking ahead. “We can already see today that if the club behaves sustainably, has specific programs, then partners follow them more easily. When it invests in energy reduction, it can then redistribute that money, for example, to the youth. Sustainability should go hand in hand with the economy.”

He enthusiastically talks about how in Dortmund they solve the carbon footprint of traveling fans, for example by giving them free transport throughout Germany for away matches with a match ticket. The Czech Republic is slowly moving towards this.

“Everything is related to the requirements of UEFA, which wants clubs to behave more sustainably. Those who play in European cups will have to comply with its instructions – measure their carbon footprint, work with waste and other things,” he points out.

They see that the measures work, they make sense. “Perhaps in Pardubice, we introduced measures to sort waste more efficiently. There was a 30 percent decrease in unsorted waste. The primary idea is that waste should not be created at all. But sometimes that doesn’t work in reality.”

He emphasizes that the basis is to change the mindset: “That is also what our campaign is about. If we change the setting, we make it easier.”

That is why he is grateful that the 18th round of the football league is dedicated to this issue. “I thank all the clubs for their involvement. This is a historic moment. There has never been such a large activity in the topic of sustainability in the past,” says Martin Šlapák.

The economics and management engineer, who missed the scoring record, is now driven by a bigger task: “We want the fans to feel at home in the stadiums, so that the football environment is healthy and clean.”