How do Bundesliga clubs travel to away games?

Paris Saint-Germain head coach Christophe Galtier and star forward Kylian Mbappe recently laughed at the suggestion that the French champions PSG take a two-hour train journey rather than a jet to Nantes for an away game.

While the answer cast the French striker and coach in a light that does little to dispel the disconnected nature of those at the top level of football, it also raised the question of how top-level football teams are traveling to away games.

The Bundesliga is a league that has plenty of innovative climate-friendly ideas, including carbon-zero stadiums, solar-panels and even an on-site well so as to reduce water consumption.

Though many fans also do their best to protect the environment, their footprint is still considerable. According to a 2020 study conducted by the climate advisory agency C02OL on behalf of German public broadcaster Deutschlandfunk, football fans produce around 7,800 tons of harmful emissions per matchday. Much has been made of the emissions generated by fans' traveling, so what about the clubs themselves?

Plane, bus or train?

DW inquired at each of the 18 Bundesliga clubs about their method of travel for away games. Seven clubs did not respond, three said they were unable to reveal any information as a result of either security issues, data privacy (despite the broad nature of the request) and unknown kickoff times.

Eight clubs did, however, release varying amounts of information about their travel patterns.

Borussia Dortmund said they would travel to more than half of their away games (nine-plus games) this season by bus, while Schalke said that, so far this campaign, the club had traveled to three away games by bus and one by plane.

Werder Bremen stated that last season (when Werder were in the second division) they made 10 away trips by bus, five by plane (three on scheduled flights) and two by train. They added that they always made the return journey with the same mode of transport they used for the outward leg.

Both Bochum and Frankfurt stated that they only fly in "exceptional cases," with the latter citing midweek European games followed by an away game in Berlin or Munich as an example of such. The graphic below reveals how Frankfurt traveled to all of their away games in the Bundesliga last season, when the club won the Europa League.

Mainz revealed that last season they took the bus 11 times and flew the other six trips to away games. The club follows a rough plan of only flying to locations further than 400 kilometers (249 miles) away, and opting for scheduled flights over chartered planes whenever possible.

Cologne said most trips up to four hours were done by bus. Freiburg stated that games in the area around them in the south and southwest of Germany were usually traveled to on the bus, that before the pandemic, games in the west were visited by train and that longer trips, such as Berlin or Bremen, were done by plane.

Indeed, the pandemic has virtually ended train travel for Bundesliga sides as a result of the risk of breaking the hygiene protocols still in place. Some clubs also stated that the unreliability of the train service ruled it out as a method of reliable transport.

Plane travel out of control

Giulio Mattioli, a transport researcher and expert, told DW that part of the issue is that flying everywhere has become an expectation rather than a luxury, particularly for people in affluent circles such as footballers.

"I've got this impression air travel is embedded into their life and it's an expectation,"Mattioloi said. |Perhaps that's the most dangerous aspect: People in certain positions take it for granted — and that creates this habit effect."

That may have to change. The impact of flights is becoming increasingly hard to ignore. A 2022 paper on greenhouse gas conversion factors by the "UK Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy" found that domestic flights were nine times more polluting per passenger than buses.

According to calculations by Mattioli and his colleagues, Mbappe and Co.'s now-infamous flight from Paris to Nantes on September 3, lasted 42 minutes and emitted seven to 17 times as much greenhouse gases per traveler than the same journey by coach would have. A direct train from Paris to Nantes takes two hours.

"There has been no deliberate attempt to curb air travel," Mattioli said. "More could be done by regulating domestic and private flights, and a moratorium on airport expansion would be good. If you constrain supply then demand will have to find a way to adapt."

Physical consideration

Clearly the main reason teams fly is for comfort, and indeed there is a regenerative component at play here.

"A couple things we see very often after long trips are a 'tight hips, tight back' feeling and an increased perception of pain around those areas. Considering the lower back and down are a footballer's bread and butter, it's so much nicer when time spent in that position is limited," Julia Eyre, a sports scientist and psychologist who works in football, told DW.

"You can definitely mitigate it [on bus or train] by walking around, but anything longer than two hours is going to be uncomfortable," said Eyre, who, in addition to being the athletic director at the TSG Wiesek youth academy in central Germany, also runs her own business, White Lion Performance.

"Footballers tend to have really tight hamstrings, hips and hips flexors," Eyre said, "so, if you're getting on the pitch straight afterwards, teams tend to fly because they're only traveling for a couple of hours."

In a billion-dollar sport obsessed with fine margins, a couple of hours can make all the difference, and so it's hard to see a future in which football sacrifices regeneration for environmental protection. Clearly, there are bigger perpetuators in the field of plane pollution than football clubs, but these wealthy entities with enormous social influence must realize that their choices are no laughing matter.

Edited by Chuck Penfold