Football meets Culture

“Football Meets Culture” is an integrative educational program that improves opportunities for children in 3rd to 6th grade from challenging neighborhoods. With the combination of soccer, language lessons and culture, it promotes their language and social skills, trains their learning behavior and strengthens their self-confidence. “Football meets culture” has been running for over 15 years and currently comprises 34 locations in 23 cities. We currently support over 800 children per school year throughout Germany.

The joy of movement, teamwork and language skills are just as relevant as vocabulary development, expressiveness, reading and writing. To this end, the children receive one half of language training and one half of soccer training twice a week over the course of two school years. The training is usually led by youth coaches from local professional clubs. Our cultural activities add another important component to the concept, namely access to art and culture.

The language training is intended to improve the children’s language skills and the associated academic performance, while the soccer training promotes the children’s social skills. The children see themselves as a team and learn fair play. As a motivating force, soccer binds the children to our learning content. The cultural activities broaden the children’s cultural experience and provide regular and additional language opportunities.

Our program creates special moments, such as our FtK Europe Challenge. Here, all FtK children across Germany were able to engage with European countries culturally as part of a cross-location competition. Every year, our program is rounded off by the final FtK tournament, in which all participating children from all locations play for the coveted challenge cup.