European Football Cluster

The SE European Football Cluster was lanched on 25th of March 2022. The Cluster was suspended on 25 February 2025.  Please see official communication in documents.

Purpose

The purpose of the Standard Ethics European Football Cluster is on the one hand, to provide an overview of Sustainability within the industry and the football community and, on the other hand, to monitor the steps European clubs are taking to align with OECD, EU and UN voluntary sustainability indications.

Each Standard Ethics’ Cluster is public and operates on a full disclosure basis: the methodology and selection criteria are publicly available and may therefore be freely used as benchmarks by decision-makers and stakeholders. Standard Ethics’ Clusters (formerly known as Indexes or Benchmarks) have been applying the same methodology since 2004 and are self-financed. Standard Ethics’ work focuses on sustainability ratings, and its clusters are not subject to commercial activity or used as financial products.

Consituents

This is a thematic Cluster consisting of 15 of Europe's largest listed football clubs. The components were selected according to their economic size. Other factors were also considered, including the availability of ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) data; extra-financial and financial reporting; the quality of disclosure and the availability of multilingual documentation.

The weights of the individual constituents are derived from the solicited or unsolicited Corporate Standard Ethics Rating (SER) assigned to each club.

Rebalancing and Review

If the Agency intends to track the Cluster’s performance, as it has done in the past, it will determine the weighting of each component based on the Standard Ethics Rating and rebalance the Cluster on a monthly basis.

The Cluster is reviewed every six months, at the end of the first and third quarter.

Rating actions will be recorded only on the dates when the review is scheduled to take place.