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Why Climate Activists Are Protesting Their Favorite Sports Teams

Climate change is rendering the future of many sports more dangerous or impossible. But many teams are still taking fossil-fuel dollars.

Protesters gather outside of Citi Field in New York City to object to the Mets’ partnership with Citibank.

In January 2025, wildfire swept through the Los Angeles suburb of Pacific Palisades, burning thousands of houses. Dennis Higgins showed me photos of what was left of his home: a chimney, an archway, ashes.

“It was devastating,” Higgins said. “We all got out healthy—my family’s fine, the two dogs made it—but the entire community is just gone.”

After 35 years in California, Higgins moved back to New York City. And on February 17, he joined a small group of activists outside Citi Field, the New York Mets’ stadium in Queens, to protest the team’s naming deal with Citigroup, the biggest lender to fossil fuel companies since the 2015 Paris Agreement.

These firms can see the catastrophic effects of climate change just as clearly as we can. That’s why Citigroup gestures at efforts toward “the energy transition” alongside “energy security.” Sowing complacency is crucial to keeping fossil fuel extraction going as long as it can. And hitching themselves to sports teams is a strategy as obvious as it is effective. According to a 2021 Nielsen study, consumers trust brands that sponsor sporting events almost as much as they trust brands recommended by family and friends.

“It works for them very well to put their name on a baseball stadium where people come and have fun,” Higgins told me. “There’s a lot of fossil fuel financing that’s wrecking our world.”

The Citi Field protesters are part of a nascent movement drawing connections between climate disasters like the Palisades fire, fossil fuel companies, the banks that enable them, and the sports teams who lend their reputations in support. That morning, simultaneous demonstrations at 10 professional sports stadiums across the country protested teams’ deals with the likes of Gulf Oil (the Boston Celtics), NRG Energy (the Philadelphia Eagles), and Phillips 66 (the Los Angeles Dodgers).

Activists and scholars say these sponsorships amount to “sportswashing,” in which corporate or state actors use athletics to launder their own reputations. “They do an excellent job of ingratiating themselves to the public, and one of the ways that they do that is associating themselves with sports teams,” said Laura Iwanaga, who protested the Portland Timbers’ jersey deal with fossil fuel financier Bank of America. “Everybody loves their sports team.”

The New York contingent’s focus on Citigroup echoed demands made by New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams in 2023, when he called on the Mets to drop Citibank if it “refuses to end its toxic relationship with the fossil fuel industry.”

Claire Regan, one of the three Roman Catholic religious sisters protesting the Mets, said her mother taught her the proverb about being known by the company you keep. She told me, “As a Mets fan, as a New Yorker, I........

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