Football: Going Beyond the Game to Address Poverty
Written by Telma Alvarenga and Tania Beatriz Martínez
Football is one of the biggest sports worldwide. According to FIFA, there are 270 million players in the world, and during the 2018 FIFA World Cup, there were 3.572 billion viewers — half of the world’s population. Paraguay is not immune to this football obsession. It’s not surprising that there are lots of kids (and their parents) who dream of becoming professional players. In addition to the fame and glory of being cheered by millions of fans, football brings the promise of a fast track out of poverty.
Reaching the professional level on the best football teams in the country, or better yet, the world, feels like a bet that will almost never hit the jackpot. Despite the considerable efforts of young players and their parents, who may invest more time and resources in their physical training than in school, most children do not make it to the major leagues.
And many of them come from very vulnerable backgrounds.
It is all too common for children to start their daily training without having their first meal. Many live in precarious and overcrowded houses, lack adequate nutrition, and some even deal with domestic violence. And yet, they are expected to train and perform optimally to continue pursuing their athletic dreams.
Training also takes its toll on the parents who accompany their children to practices. Typical training may take around 30 hours a week — time parents could have spent working. In some cases, entire families feel the need to leave their houses and move to the cities in which their children are training, leaving behind their jobs, friends, and extended family.
Football academies can help improve this situation.
Given their power to congregate a large number of children and their parents, football academies can offer a great opportunity for their personal development. By visualizing the families’ needs and better leveraging available resources, football academies may effectively help them pave a path out of poverty. In this way, regardless of what the future holds for these children, their families can discover the tools they need to plan a better life for themselves.
Cerro Porteño
Located in the Paraguayan capital, Asunción, Club Cerro Porteño is one of the most popular local football teams. It is also known for being a hotbed of talented players with an impressive fan base. It has about 220 players in its main youth league, and it supervises dozens of other subsidiary leagues in the countryside.
Cerro Porteño Foundation aims to go beyond simply training children for the possibility of making it to the major leagues by tackling their families’ basic needs as well. This is why they have decided to partner with the Businesses Without Poverty program.
Businesses Without Poverty
In Paraguay, Fundación Paraguaya has used the Stoplight with 126 businesses to strengthen their social responsibility programs by measuring and working to eliminate multidimensional poverty in their workforces.
With a benchmark that guides progress, businesses set the goal of having zero workforce poverty. The program leverages public-private collaboration, sharing best practices and benefits with the organizations that are part of the group.
The Business Without Poverty program has enabled organizations to focus not only on their employees’ well-being, but also to go one step further and engage as a network that generates opportunities to improve their workers’ quality of life.
Football without Poverty
This project by Fundación Paraguaya and the Cerro Porteño Foundation is part of the Business without Poverty program, but instead of focusing on a workforce, it focuses on the youth leagues and their families.
The pilot project involves football players of Cerro Porteño’s youth league, based in Ypane, near the capital city of Asunción. In late June, a baseline survey was conducted with 53 football players. A report with the results was sent to the Cerro Porteño Foundation where they will assess the priorities of the indicators that are most common among the participants. Those priorities will then set the framework for the action plan the institution will carry out in order to engage and encourage children and their families to overcome poverty step by step.
The project is an opportunity not only to address the needs of the youth who dream of becoming football stars, but also the needs of their parents, many of whom think a promising football career for their children is the only answer to all their problems. The Stoplight may also help redirect the attention of parents and children back to their own well-being, inspiring them to improve their quality of life through other means, thus diminishing the pressure on their children to succeed athletically at all costs. After all, only 1 in 10 children who play in their youth league become professional players.
For this reason, Cerro Porteño plans to become the first sports club in Paraguay to eliminate poverty for all their players, including those who do not make it to the major leagues. This project has the potential to become a viable path to personal development for young athletes all over the world. By using the right approach for working with vulnerable communities, football academies can become poverty elimination hubs in their communities and ensure a better future for children. In this way, all children will have the opportunity to achieve their full potential and lead a life they feel proud of.
