On Oct. 19, soccer players from 46 countries will gather in Santiago, Chile, for eight days of matches. There will be parades, flags, tens of thousands of cheering spectators, dignitaries, plenty of TV cameras — even groupies.
Unlike the World Cup that concluded in Brazil in July, this tournament takes place every year in a different city. It includes both men and women. Games are 14 minutes long. And all the players are homeless.
Soccer is good for kids. It builds discipline, perseverance, trust, confidence and teamwork. Children need these things — but homeless adults need them even more.
“Football is a very simple game about inclusion,” said Mel Young, the president of the Homeless World Cup. Young, a Scot, was a publisher of newspapers sold by the homeless. He and Harald Schmied, a publisher from Austria, came up with the idea at a street paper convention in 2001. “Normally, our people are isolated, have very low self-esteem, very low self-respect,” Young said. “They are by necessity very selfish, thinking only about how will I get to tomorrow? How will I sleep? What will I eat?
“But they have to turn up to be part of a team. They have to pass balls to each other. There are coaches, they provide each other some support. As soon as you start playing football, you forget you’re homeless.”
The Homeless World Cup is not just for the 500 people who will play in Santiago. The international competition has given rise to soccer programs for homeless adults in countries around the world, with their own national tournaments. (Children compete in a different tournament, the Street Child World Cup.) In the United States, the tournament’s partner is Street Soccer USA, founded in 2004 in Charlotte, N.C., by Lawrence Cann, a college soccer player who now lives in New York.
[For more of this story, written by Tina Rosenburg, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...region&_r=1&]
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