Homeless World Cup
The Homeless World Cup is an annual football tournament organized by the Homeless World Cup Foundation, a social organization which advocates the end of homelessness through the sport of association football. The organization puts together an annual football tournament where teams of homeless people from each country compete.
The 2008 tournament was the first to include a women's competition. From 2010 onwards, all tournaments have featured both men's and women's teams.
History
The Homeless World Cup organization was co-founded by Mel Young and Harald Schmied in 2001 to advocate for a global solution to homelessness. The first annual football tournament for homeless people took place in 2003 in Graz, Austria. Host cities since then have included Gothenburg, Edinburgh, Copenhagen, Cape Town, Melbourne, Milan, Rio de Janeiro, Paris, Mexico City, Poznań, Santiago, Amsterdam, Glasgow, Oslo and Mexico City. Most recently, the 2019 edition was hosted by Wales in Bute Park, Cardiff, with Michael Sheen opening the tournament.The 2020 tournament had been due to take place in Tampere, Finland, but was cancelled as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic
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The international headquarters of the Homeless World Cup is in Edinburgh, Scotland.
National partners
The Homeless World Cup organization operates through a network of more than 70 national partners around the world, supporting football programs and social enterprise development.| List of national partners |
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Format
Fields
Since 2015 the tournament has been played on synthetic turf fields from Act Global.Rules
Player eligibility
Players must meet all of the following criteria:- Be at least 16 years old at the time of the tournament
- Have not taken part in previous Homeless World Cup tournaments
- Have been homeless at some point after the previous year's tournament in accordance with the national definition of homelessness
- Make their main living income as a streetpaper vendor
- Be asylum seekers currently without positive asylum status or who were previously asylum seekers but obtained residency status a year before the event
- Currently be in drug or alcohol rehabilitation and also have been homeless at some point in the past two years
Participants
- 3 outfield players,
- 1 goalkeeper,
- Plus 4 substitution players
Tournament details
The field measures 22m long x 16m wide.
Results
Men
Women
Performance by country
Men
Women
Media coverage
Several TV documentaries have been made tracking the participation of teams from homelessness to participating at the annual event.In 2011, a 90-minute documentary called Hors-Jeu: Carton rouge contre l’exclusion was broadcast by Canal+ and focused on the Paris 2011 Homeless World Cup and Homeless World Cup itself and five national partners: Japan, Argentina, Palestine, France and Kenya. It was aired in France on 9 October 2011. The documentary was directed by Jérôme Mignard and Thomas Risch.
The 2006 Homeless World Cup was the subject of a documentary entitled Kicking It. directed by Susan Koch and Jeff Werner focusing on the experiences of seven homeless people at the Homeless World Cup football game in South Africa. Featured in the documentary, narrated by actor Colin Farrell were residents of Afghanistan; Kenya; Dublin, Ireland; Charlotte, North Carolina, U.S.; Madrid, Spain and St. Petersburg in Russia. The film premiered in January, 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, distributed by Liberation Entertainment, Netflix and ESPN.