'Street soccer' on the move in Europe 

The Homeless World Championship 2004 has just kicked off in Gothenberg, Sweden, and will run from 25 July to 1 August. Participation is up from 18 to 27 international teams, including newcomers such as France, Portugal, Cameroon, Namibia, Ukraine, Argentina and Japan. The event, which is organised by International Network of Street Papers (INSP), and among others, supported by streetfootballworld, sees a maximum of four players per team (squads of eight) battle it out on a 20m x 14m hard court in a series of 14-minute matches. The players are male or female, at least 16 years old and must have been homeless at some point since the last World Cup, make most of their living as streetpaper vendors, be aslyum seekers (with no positive asylum status or working permit) or be currently in drug or alcohol rehabilitation.

Ironically, the measure of the tournament's success is how many competitors do not end up playing in the next tournament. According to the organisers of the Homeless World Cup, 31 of the 141 who played in the last World Cup now have regular jobs. Twelve have signed with football clubs as players or coaches and 49 have changed their life situation significantly by taking "back to work" courses, specific training schemes, achieving stable housing situations and social relations or having drug dependencies addressed.

"The aim is to get you to participate once in the tournament," event spokesperson Anna-Lisa Schuster told the Nouvel Observateur. As in the real World Cup, national anthems are played before the matches, an emotional moment for the players. She went on to tell the French weekly paper that "they are really proud to represent their country in another country. In their own country they generally don't have any respect. When they are in the streets selling newspapers, they're nothing". Nor does the winner take it all as there is a team award for fair play and a trophy for the top goalscorer.

The co-ordinators of the worldwide network, streetfootballworld, have just submitted an application on "football and integration of third country nationals" to the European Commission. Their plan is to create and implement a Europe-wide best practice survey of such programmes dealing with "football and integration", to make the work public, evaluate it and present it during the upcoming World Cup (2006 in Germany) at a European Forum.

As part of the European Year of Education through Sports (EYES) , partners from the network have been working with the Streetfootball European Championships on national projects such as "Kick forward" from Stuttgart. The project brings together over 3,000 children in two youth camps with pupils from East and West Germany. The possibility of in tegrating the results of these camps and courses into formal education will be tested in a school project.

Other football-related programmes under EYES include the transnational Goethe Institut-led project "Final with 30 years of 'extra time'". In this context, streetfootballworld worked with the Goethe Institute from Rotterdam to organise a street football tournament in the Netherlands just before the Germany v Netherlands EURO 2004 match. Harking back to the the World Cup Finals in 1974, the idea was to promote an interactive, cross-cultural exchange between young people from two countries, where prejudices and stereotypes about one another are still marked.