UEFA – football for all
Posted on 02/07/2007
UEFA’s partnership with the Homeless World Cup has brought great benefits to the annual international football tournament and the individual projects setting up national teams.
With the support of the 2005 Monaco Charity Cheque the Homeless World Cup could leap from involving 27 nations in Edinburgh (2005) to 48 nations in Cape Town (2006), granting 22 nations from economically poorer nations travel bursaries to participate.
The
number of street soccer leagues giving access to sport to homeless and
excluded people all year round has risen to 16 and the number of
national qualification trials is now at 24, benefiting an estimated
17,000 people around the world. The aim is to reach 100,000 people per
year by 2010. And the partnership with UEFA continues to open doors
with new potential partners who can help make this happen.
We
spoke to William Galliard, Communications Director, UEFA about the
impact that UEFA’s financial contribution has enabled and just what
that means to UEFA.
“Sport, particularly football, can do a lot in terms of health and re-establishing social ties that have been loosened. And as football and young people are an area of UEFA's expertise we feel that we should intervene.
This year UEFA dedicated 5 million Swiss francs to its Corporate Social Responsibility Programme supporting sports with organisation such as Red Cross, IPSA, and Special Olympics.
With the Homeless World Cup, we felt that it met our criteria in our CSR strategy whilst reaching a population we had not reached before. Our goals are similar in that we both want to help people enjoy life through football, so it was a natural partnership.
And for UEFA it has increased our own awareness of how much football means to all social categories. For some of our great competitions we gather all the VIPs from Europe, have cocktails and canapés and it can be quite blaze. Then you see the enthusiasm with which the players at the Homeless World Cup jump on a sandwich, that a free sandwich is something really fantastic. It is extremely useful to remind oneself that food is a basic necessity that we take for granted. That a roof above your head, a bed to sleep in, a basic human need, is not accessible to everyone.
That football is increasingly recognising this, and giving back to the community is a great thing. In six months we have seen two leading European Clubs set what we can hope is the beginning of a trend. Barcelona has established a relationship with UNICEF and Chelsea announced a relationship with Right To Play. That Barcelona instead of sponsor would pay money to put UNICEF on their shirts is excellent.
If you are a football club try to
use football for a social purpose. This is an area where you have
expertise and experience and through football we can achieve a lot.”
