In October 2024, the Los Angeles Rams and California Resources Corporation (CRC) launched “Football Without the Footprint,” a carbon management initiative that named CRC the Rams’ Official Carbon Management Partner and brought both organizations together to address the emissions generated by team operations. The 2025 season delivered the first full year of the program.
For the Rams, the objective was to better understand the franchise’s operational carbon footprint, find local solutions through measured, independently verified action, and to bring that work to life for fans through a full season of gameday, digital, and community programming.
For CRC, the objective was to prove that local energy production and measurable decarbonization can work together – leveraging the reach of the Rams to demonstrate carbon management at scale, build understanding of its crucial role in achieving California’s ambitious climate goals, and make a complex climate solution tangible and relevant to Southern California audiences.
Both organizations set a shared objective of building the program on the Rams’ own energy and travel data, keeping the projects inside California wherever possible, and pairing the environmental work with hands-on investment in Los Angeles schools. That investment took the form of five sustainable gardens built on local campuses and a STEAM education program teaching students the science behind the partnership.
The Rams are the first NFL team in California to purchase locally sourced carbon credits to offset the team’s footprint. Year one delivered roughly 79,000 metric tons of independently verified emissions reductions and 11.5 million cross-channel impressions.
The strategy rested on two core principles: measure before claiming, and keeping the impact local.
First, measure before claiming. The Rams shared stats behind a season - the energy used at the team facility andmiles traveled to away games. CRC used those figures to build a plan tailored to the Rams’ operations. The first step was to match the Rams’ fuel and energy use to CRC’s own California production, which MiQ, an independent auditor of methane emissions, grades in its top tier and which carries roughly half the emissions of the California average before the fuel is ever used. The second step offset the rest.
Second, keeping the impact local. Every offset came from a project a Los Angeles fan could find on a map. One supports the permanent plugging of oil wells in Huntington Beach, earned a top-tier score from BeZero, an independent agency that rates whether carbon projects actually deliver what they promise. Another protects forest land in the Colorado River watershed, a source of much of Southern California’s drinking water, under the state of California’s own regulated carbon program. The credits were then retired and permanently taken off the market, so no other company can count them.
Local also meant showing up in person. CRC and the Rams built five sustainable gardens at schools from Woodland Hills to Inglewood to Long Beach, each one a permanent campus resource rather than a single volunteer day. CRC presented the inaugural STEAM Career Day at SoFi Stadium and brought it’s STEAM Squad program to Long Beach middle schools, where students experienced a live carbon-cycle demonstration before hearing from a career panel about the jobs that bring the work to life.
For fans, the same idea had to travel in plain language. A Football Without the Footprint activation ran at three home games, pairing a Rams Legend autograph signing and an interactive football toss with an accessible look at how carbon capture works. Season-long messaging across the stadium and the team’s channels reinforced one clear message: the Rams are cutting their footprint using energy and projects from California.
Year one met both parts of the objective, the technical and the cultural.
CRC delivered emissions reductions and offsets on the Rams’ behalf totaling roughly 79,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of avoiding emissions from more than 17,000 for a year – all verified by an . independent third party..
The partnership generated 11.5 million cross-channel impressions, roughly double the previous year, alongside 3 million earned broadcast impressions, up 52%. It also drove 6.8 million in-stadium impressions, nearly six times the prior year’s total, and 1.5 million impressions across the Rams’ owned-and-operated social channels, a twelvefold increase. The Vamos Rams series delivered 270,000 cross-channel impressions, a fourfold increase.
Community programming reached more than 1,000 students across STEAM Career Day at SoFi Stadium and STEAM Squad school visits. The five completed garden builds generated 416,700 cross-channel impressions across 48 posts. Gameday activations drew 18,000 visitors over three home games at an average dwell time of 15 minutes, eight minutes longer than the prior season.
Success was measured against two simple questions: Can we find meaningful solutions close to home, and can we use the partnership to engage people beyond our two organizations? In its first year, the program demonstrated both.
