Meet young Arsenal goalkeeper Alexei Rojas making waves behind the scenes at the club
Alexei Rojas has been inspiring change behind the scenes at Arsenal and in the wider football world through his sustainability campaigning, despite only being 19 years old
by Felix Keith · The MirrorFor someone so young, Alexei Rojas has already achieved a lot.
The 19-year-old goalkeeper only signed his first professional contract with Arsenal in July, and yet he’s already made huge strides at the club. And while he is focused on breaking into Mikel Arteta’s first team one day, he also has other goals off the pitch.
He is passionate about sustainability and hasn’t been afraid to use his platform to speak up about what he believes in. That drive began when he was just 10 years old, after being educated on the subject by his mum, who works as risk manager for a company that builds offshore wind farms. For the last nine years, Rojas has been doing everything in his power to make a difference.
“Ever since I’ve been at Arsenal I’ve had the opportunity to speak up about it and drive change within the club,” he tells Mirror Football. “Certain things have changed, mainly around recycling bins, eliminating single-use plastics and more operational things around energy use – where we’re getting our energy from and the type of light bulbs at Hale End, where the academy is.
“More recently I’ve been speaking up about the link between sport and sustainability and how the two go hand-in-hand, not only because sport has such a big negative impact because of travel, logistics, operations and fans, but also because football has such a big audience worldwide and has such a big impact on people and their day-to-day lives. If we can push sustainability messages and get people involved through sport then I think we can make real collective change.”
Rojas is an ambassador for charitable movement Common Goal and also works with non-profit Football for Future. He has enjoyed giving speeches to youngsters and is helping to develop an educational sustainability programme for Premier League academies.
Earlier this week, Common Goal and Football for Future announced the launch of the Fields of Change handbook, a training resource for grassroots sporting organisations looking to integrate sustainability into their work. Based on a year-long collaboration between sports organisations around the world and supported by Adidas, it offers practical guidance on making environmentally-minded decisions.
Rojas was involved in its creation and believes it’s a good example of the kinds of initiatives that can really make a difference: a bottom-up, grassroots scheme which also gets top-down support. “The most important thing is that the two things connect and one drives the other,” he explains.
“When you have more bottom-up approaches, big organisations can see that is what people are looking for, so they want to get involved and back it. It’s great that the handbook has come about through both approaches – they’re both necessary to make real change. You can’t do one without the other. With bottom-up approaches, you can get a lot of people doing things in a very small capacity and the most important thing is that it’s a big collective movement.”
Arsenal have been supportive of Rojas’ passions and he isn’t afraid of the potential criticism that could come his way. PFA sustainability champion David Wheeler told Mirror Football that some players are worried about speaking up due to fears of being labelled hypocrites due to their lifestyle.
“The way I look at it is that you can’t be 100 per cent perfect,” Rojas explains. “There’s always going to be some impact and, at the end of the day, football is still a performance industry where the number one goal is to win, not to be as sustainable as we can be.
“But within that, what matters is that football organisations are able to still control what they can control, in terms of being able to influence fans, not producing loads of waste, or using lots of plastic and being able to push positive sustainability messages. It’s important to understand that it’s not perfect but nothing can be. You do what you can, because it’s always better to do something instead of nothing.”
He is still at the start of his football career, having not yet made his first-team debut for Arsenal, but Rojas is already an experienced professional in terms of sustainability – and there is undoubtedly plenty more to come.
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