When Dale Vince became the chairman of Forest Green Rovers, a hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old club in English soccer’s fourth tier, in the autumn of 2010, one of the first problems that he set out to fix was on the menu. The club was serving meat lasagna to the players, a practice that, Vince says, conflicted with the team’s values. “I saw that and realized that made us part of the meat trade,” he told me. He added, “We agreed on the spot that we’d take red meat off the menu. Then we began to express our values into the club in all respects. That began the journey.” Soon, the front office did away with white meat and fish for players, staff, and fans alike. Eventually, Vince, who is fifty-six, and can frequently be found kitted out in fashionably punk attire to go with his long, flowing hair, changed catering companies altogether, hiring Em Franklin, a cook at one of his favorite restaurants near Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, the small civil parish that the team calls home.

Forest Green is the first completely vegan professional sports team in the world. But its ethos extends way beyond food. The team plays on an organic and vegan field, called the New Lawn, which is fed with a solution of Scottish seaweed that’s hand-cut and cold-pressed. No pesticides are used to kill weeds; the groundskeeper, Adam Witchell, pulls them himself. “I’m the only groundskeeper here, except for the robot,” he told me recently. He was referring to Forest Green’s lawnmower, an autonomous, solar-powered, G.P.S.-guided device they call the Mow Bot. The New Lawn’s stadium boasts solar panels, a rainwater-collection system, drainage under the pitch that captures excess water for reuse, and charging stations for electric cars. In May, FIFA dubbed the team the “world’s greenest football club.”

The team’s eco-friendly transformation began after the volunteers who ran the shareholder-owned club had racked up an enormous debt and asked Vince for a loan of thirty thousand British pounds to get through the summer. Vince, a former hippie who lived in a trailer for ten years, had founded Ecotricity, one of Great Britain’s largest green-energy companies, in 1996, and made a fortune. (He’s said to be worth a hundred million pounds.) Several months later, Forest Green’s board asked Vince for more money, at which time he realized how much danger the club was in. “We faced a very clear choice between walking away and seeing it fall over, or rolling up our sleeves and getting completely immersed in the club and putting every aspect of it into a different place,” Vince told me. The only way he could right the ship, he decided, was to become the club’s director, and his company, Ecotricity, became its majority owner. That meant doing things his way, and for Vince, a devout environmentalist, the opportunity to present a green message to an unlikely audience—sports fans—proved too tempting to pass up.

Under chairman Dale Vince, the Forest Green Rovers’ club has become a platform for environmentalism. Photograph by Stephen Shepherd / eyevine via Redux

The responses have varied, wildly. “For Dale to step in and take on the moral and financial responsibility for a village club, he was very much welcomed by everybody—until the day he decided to stop selling meat,” Tim Barnard, a lifelong fan who’s written a book about the team’s history, told me. “That upset quite a few fans.” The vegan menu has also given rival fans plenty of good-natured ammunition. The Forest Green defender Dale Bennett says that he has heard fans yell, “You look like you’re losing weight!” and “We can tell you’ve had no meat!” Barnard says that the jeers often take a more instructive tone; he has often heard visiting fans chanting, “You can stuff your veggie burgers up your arse!”

At the training ground, however, players have taken to the vegan cuisine. “They used to joke, ‘I don’t know what I’ve just eaten, but it was bloomin’ delicious!’ ” Franklin, the chef, said. “I do have the added bonus that when they get to me they’ve just finished training, and they’re fairly hungry.” Franklin says the proteins she uses include Quorn (a fungus-derived meat substitute), tofu, soy milk, and nuts. Players get their needed amino acids from a vast quantity of vegetables. Among the converted is Bennett, who has become a vegan himself—even when he’s not at work.

Others have a more jaded view. “There is a certain amount of resentment from other clubs for its vaguely evangelical ecological stance that’s backed up by the old-fashioned thing of just spending more money than your opponents,” James Richardson, a longtime host of soccer TV shows and podcasts in Great Britain, told me. “They do spend a lot of [Vince’s] money—his ‘green,’ if you like. But, elsewhere in the football world, people are delighted.”

Part of that resentment stems from the team’s success on the field. English soccer has roughly twenty-four tiers: at the top is the globally popular Premier League; at the bottom are the more than fifty-five hundred non-league teams. At the end of last season, for the first time in Forest Green’s long history, the club earned entrance into the fourth tier (confusingly known as League Two), where it’s currently competing, becoming the smallest club to reach the fully professional ranks. Fans from around the world have come to watch the team play. The stadium food is highly regarded; the vegan pie placed highly at this year’s British Pie Awards. “As much as the club is selling ecology, ecology is also selling the club,” Richardson told me.

Vince now has even grander plans: a stunning all-wood stadium—the world’s greenest—designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, with all of Forest Green’s current accoutrements, plus energy-saving L.E.D. lights embedded in the roofline. It’s still in the early approval stages; the price tag is unknown.

Whatever its cost, it will undoubtedly give Vince an even bigger platform for environmentalism. “At end of the day, if Dale was forcing us to smoke twenty cigarettes a day and eat burgers made of toenails, I think I’d have a problem with it,” Barnard told me. “But if what he’s doing is offering high-quality food, I don’t see how even the most macho person in the world could argue with that.”