Veganuary 2024: Football club goes 100% vegan for January match - with discounts for vegan fans

A football club plans to celebrate Veganuary by making its stadium 100% vegan for an upcoming home game - even offering plant-based snacks and discounts for vegan fans.

East Sussex's Lewes FC, which boasts the claim of being the world’s first gender-equal football club - meaning male and female players are paid the same - while also being both non-profit and community-owned, is introducing the new initiative for Veganuary, an annual challenge which encourages people to live a vegan lifestyle for the month of January. The club will offer vegan fans a discount on tickets to their Barclays Women’s Championship match against Durham, while feeding them a range of unique plant-based creations - including seaweed on chips, creamy vegan chicken pie, and vegan meatballs.

On normal matchdays around half of the food options on offer are vegan. However on 21 January, The Dripping Pan stadium will welcome fans for the women's team's match with only vegan food and drink options. Fans will also be rewarded with a 20% discount from their ticket price of £12 if they use the code VEGANSROCK.

Bradley Pritchard, a midfielder in the men's team, has even started his own pitch-side community garden as a condition in his contract, which grows food for the community and has prompted free plant-based cooking classes, available to all.

Lewes FC commercial manager Stef McLoughlin told SWNS the initiative is designed both to show the club's appreciation for its vegan fanbase, as well as to encourage more vegan fans to the pioneering club. “Our vegan fans are passionate, full of purpose and on a mission," she said.

"It’s great to be able to dedicate our match against Durham to them to show our appreciation. We hope that this initiative brings more vegan fans to the club while also encouraging people to make kinder and more sustainable food choices."

The Veganuary movement and educational non-profit were started in the UK. Since its first iteration in 2014, the event has grown in size each year - from nearly 13,000 in the first year to more than 700,000 people signing up to take part in 2023. Supermarket chains and restaurants have also got on board with the event, with the likes of Tesco running Veganuary-themed ads for plant-based products.

As well as preventing animals being slaughtered for meat, reducing personal climate impact has shown to be a big driver behind people joining the challenge. A major University of Oxford study from earlier this year found that meat-free eating had a substantially lower environmental impact across metrics including land use, water pollution risk, water use and biodiversity loss - and produced just a quarter of the greenhouse gases of high-meat diets.

Lewes FC vs Durham will kick off at midday on Sunday, 21 January. Tickets can be booked online here.