Homeless World Cup

Updated on Jan 18, 2024

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Founded 2001 Number of teams 70+		Region World Current champions Mexico (2nd title)

Most successful team(s) Mexico Scotland Brazil Italy Chile (2 titles each) Website http://www.homelessworldcup.org/

The Homeless World Cup is an annual football tournament organized by the Homeless World Cup organization, a social organization which advocates the end of homelessness through the sport of association football (or soccer). The organization puts together an annual football tournament where teams of homeless people from each country compete. The fifteenth edition of the Homeless World Cup will take place in Oslo, Norway in 2017. The defending champions are Mexico, who won in Glasgow in 2016.

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 and Glasgow.

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.

Player eligibility

Players must meet all of the following criteria:

Be male or female and at least 16 years old at the time of the tournament

Have not taken part in previous Homeless World Cup tournaments

Also, must be any of the following:

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

A maximum of 4 players per team on the court:

3 outfield players,

1 goalkeeper,

Plus 4 substitution players (rolling substitution allowed)

Tournament details

The winning team gets 3 points. The losing team gets zero points. If a match ends in a draw, it is decided by sudden-death penalty shootout and the winning team gets two points and the losing team gets one point. Games are 14 minutes long, in two seven-minute halves. The field measures 22m long x 16m wide.

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 (soccer) game in South Africa. Featured in the documentary, narrated by actor Colin Farrell were residents of Afghanistan; Kenya; Dublin, Ireland; Charlotte, 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.

References

Homeless World Cup Wikipedia

(Text) CC BY-SA

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