For more than two years, with the the support of the EU’s Erasmus+Sport programme, we have been running the “Football Including Refugees in Europe” (FIRE) project, with the dual aim of studying how football can be used as a lever for welcoming and integrating people in exile, and of designing practical tools for supporting clubs that want to get involved in these schemes.
After several months of sharing experiences, we are proud to bring you the results of our work. In these pages you will be able to read an overview of the state of play in Europe, the first stage of our project, from Pr. Albrecht Sonntag. You will also see how the project has been perceived by the four national football federations involved in the project. We also draw your attention to the three pilot projects supported by FIRE and the Fare network, selected following a call for bids. Krzysztof Jarymowicz, head of the Etnoliga programme in Poland, one of the FIRE project’s partners, will explain the philosophy behind his project, where multiculturalism and inclusion play a central role. Finally, a scoop: an introduction to the FIRE MOOC, a free, online, adapted learning course, jointly created within the project and destined for stakeholders in football who wish to become involved in integration. We hope you will share our enthusiasm for this innovative tool, devised by the ESSCA Management School, with development potential that will be useful to the FIRE+ project. The EU has indeed shown its confidence in us by renewing its support for an extra two years, to allow us to develop new learning modules and to roll the scheme out in different countries.
Football is a popular sport which allows encounters and inclusion. We are proud to see how this subject has brought together all kinds of actors from civil society, academia and the teaching world.