Aug 5, 2026 · 36 min · 11 segments
What does sustainability look like when your business builds the infrastructure for the world's biggest sports events? In this episode, Alex Smith is joined by Paul Berger, Group CEO of Arena Group…
Alex SmithHost
That's quite the history and such incredible growth for a company to go through, which means I can only assume the amount of sort of processes and, you know, the practices that have had to change in that.
And one of them has been sustainability, which has been sort of, you know, clearly embedded into a lot of what you have done over a period of time.
But sort of it's been quite important over the last couple of years to really pull that together into something that's got a framework and a structure to it and a robustness for everybody to so can you talk a little bit about yes absolutely about the messaging
absolutely you know sustainability has been for us and more so today more important but fundamentally when I took over as the group CEO it was fragmented it was fragmented we we were doing you know parts of the company in the US parts of the company in the UK were particularly active there were other parts that were not so we were all you know very conscious of our sustainability program and how important it was for us as a business and our clients but it wasn't coordinated there was no global strategy around it so with our new shareholders on board We decided that we needed a global strategy.
We needed a group ESG strategy, which I had the pleasure of launching in the next few weeks.
and obviously delighted to be working with Future Plus, and you'd obviously be very involved in that, but it's not a strategy that, you know, it's a strategy that we've pulled together from a lot of research that we've done with our clients, with our employees, with our stakeholders, with our supply chain, Um, and then the data and the findings from that, we've obviously coordinated and put it together into a strategy, um, a little bit like, you know, it's really for us to be a much more responsible business.
Um, And then once we've sort of coordinated and we launched this strategy at a group level, we will have ESG ambassadors, employees that are really involved and supportive and globally, and they will have a framework on which to follow.
And hopefully it will be coherent and consistent so that everything that we collect in terms of our data at a group level will be much more effective for us as an organization.
So we're really excited about it and obviously excited about seeing what the impact is going to have on us.
That's quite the history and such incredible growth for a company to go through, which means I can only assume the amount of sort of processes and, you know, the practices that have had to change in that.
And one of them has been sustainability, which has been sort of, you know, clearly embedded into a lot of what you have done over a period of time.
But sort of it's been quite important over the last couple of years to really pull that together into something that's got a framework and a structure to it and a robustness for everybody to so can you talk a little bit about yes absolutely about the messaging
absolutely you know sustainability has been for us and more so today more important but fundamentally when I took over as the group CEO it was fragmented it was fragmented we we were doing you know parts of the company in the US parts of the company in the UK were particularly active there were other parts that were not so we were all you know very conscious of our sustainability program and how important it was for us as a business and our clients but it wasn't coordinated there was no global strategy around it so with our new shareholders on board We decided that we needed a global strategy.
We needed a group ESG strategy, which I had the pleasure of launching in the next few weeks.
and obviously delighted to be working with Future Plus, and you'd obviously be very involved in that, but it's not a strategy that, you know, it's a strategy that we've pulled together from a lot of research that we've done with our clients, with our employees, with our stakeholders, with our supply chain, Um, and then the data and the findings from that, we've obviously coordinated and put it together into a strategy, um, a little bit like, you know, it's really for us to be a much more responsible business.
Um, And then once we've sort of coordinated and we launched this strategy at a group level, we will have ESG ambassadors, employees that are really involved and supportive and globally, and they will have a framework on which to follow.
And hopefully it will be coherent and consistent so that everything that we collect in terms of our data at a group level will be much more effective for us as an organization.
So we're really excited about it and obviously excited about seeing what the impact is going to have on us.
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