With the Lese-Kicker, we award the most appealing children’s and young people’s book in terms of idea, linguistic implementation and graphic design, which best succeeds in inspiring young people to read about football. The Lese-Kicker is a nationwide reading promotion project and simultaneously represents an award for the best German speaking football children’s and young people’s football book. The project is implemented every second year – when the World Cup or the European Championship take place. Based on our idea, we want to highlight football books, as we are convinced that young people can be motivated to read books by their favourite sport.
In 2022, the fifth edition of the Lese-Kicker was run through and enhanced by a German wide reading promotion programme in schools. Here, we provided 100 school classes with our shortlist titles. Thereupon, the books of the shortlist were presented in the framework of a stadium tour: In diverse football stadiums across Germany, a shortlist author was respectively allowed to read from his or her football book to invented school classes. In a final reading week, the classes read and discussed the books and decided on their favourite one. From these results, in combination with the ratings from an adult jury, the winning books and authors were determined.
Through the nationwide project, we reached over 2000 children in 2022, having dealt intensively with the 10 nominated children’s and youth football books with the help of exclusive teaching materials tailored to the book content.