The offices at the top of a converted warehouse in the Edinburgh port of Leith are a bit of a squeeze. As he talks, Mel Young’s head seems almost in the skylight, but there is no containing the boundless plans for his current project, the Homeless World Cup.
”We’ve got 10 000 homeless people playing football around it,” he says, in his gentle, firm way. ”It should be 100 000, or 200 000. I am incredibly ambitious for it. We’re splitting the world into five regions: Africa, Asia, Europe, South America, North America. We’re going to build a global network where people come and change their lives.”
Not much of a tall order, then, for him and his two staff squashed up here, plus one in Austria. Given Young’s background, though, you can be quite sure they’ll have a go. His grounding was in community publishing, starting in the late 1970s with the Wester Hailes Sentinel, a newspaper for a grim, grey housing estate in Edinburgh. Then, in 1993, appalled by the growing numbers of homeless people, he saw the Big Issue on the streets of London and, by agreement, set up a Scottish version. By Christmas, they were selling 140 000 copies a week.
He has been similarly opportune with the Homeless World Cup. Top-level football, particularly in Europe, is swimming in cash, and — for all the adulation — suffers an ugly, flash image, which it has begun to recognise only recently. Fifa, football’s world governing body, which is about to launch the real, half-the-planet-glued-to-the-telly World Cup, has a ”Good of the Game” taskforce considering football’s dodgy side. And a European Union government-sponsored independent review of European football reported last week that football needs to show more social ”solidarity” with its grassroots.
Young’s contribution emerged from a beery conversation at the fag end of the 2001 conference of the International Network of Street Papers, a ”trade association” of Big Issue-style projects from 60 countries. Young and Harald Schmied, who ran the street paper in Graz, Austria, were discussing ways to bring homeless people from different countries together, and hit on football, the international language. Most such great ideas don’t survive the hangover, but Young saw Schmied the next morning, and said: ”Well, are we going to do this thing?”
Two years later, the first Homeless World Cup was held in Graz itself, with teams from 18 countries competing. Young secured £30 000 sponsorship from Uefa, the European governing body. ”They’re really enlightened,” he says, ”miles ahead of other football bodies internationally, we’ve found.” Nike’s social responsibility arm also became interested and swooshed in with money, kit and branding — he says Nike are genuine, too.
The event was a soar-away success, and has grown every year since: 26 teams went to Sweden in 2004, 32 to Edinburgh last July. This September, teams from 48 countries — including Afghanistan, China, Brazil and Uganda — will compete for the cup in Cape Town. Next year’s tournament is already awarded to Copenhagen.
Young plans to beef up the post-event research, and reports back from the 217 players six months after the Edinburgh tournament were positive: 38% were in regular employment, 40% had improved their housing situation, only 18% were still selling street papers, and 94% declared that they had ”a new motivation for life”.
So pleased were Uefa that last year, at their glitzy annual bash in Monaco, they gave the Homeless World Cup their community award of one million Swiss francs. Presented by Ronaldinho, the world player of the year, it is known as ”the Monaco cheque”, which seems quite revealing about where football’s social responsibility sits in the order of things. Young will use the money to increase his staff to 14, fund a bigger tournament and expand participation in football beyond the comparative few who actually play in the Homeless World Cup.
One of the possible legacies of the Cape Town tournament is a ball-making operation employing 25 people.
Perhaps surprising to those who consider the Malcolm Glazer-owned Manchester United to be the world’s most clinical football corporation, United have been the readiest in Britain to help the Homeless World Cup, providing two coaches and the club’s Carrington training facilities for England’s representative team. ”That is fantastic,” Young says. ”But football, and the players, could do a lot more. They need to embody social responsibility as a core of what they are about.” — Â