EFDN Highlights: November 2020
As 2020 comes to an end, EFDN invites you to look back on this year’s top activities, projects and news stories. Take a look at some highlights from the 14th EFDN Conference in November, the biggest gathering of CSR experts in European football and the first one ever held online.
14th EFDN Conference
Originally planned to be held in-person at the Rat Verlegh Stadion of NAC Breda, the 14th EFDN Conference had to be moved online due to the restrictions to halt the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. But an apparent curse proved to be a true blessing: 400 participants from more than 200 clubs, leagues and FAs attended the conference virtually. With 50+ hours of presentations, studio sessions and roundtable discussions, we reached 65,000 page views on the Online Conference Platform and generated over 1.5 million impressions of #EFDNConference on Twitter.
#Morethanfootball Award 2020
The Club Brugge Foundation was awarded the #Morethanfootball Award 2020 for “The Bear and his Scarf”, a children’s bedtime story produced by the Foundation and the Club. It is a story about respect, values and principles targeted at children and parents. In the book, the characters – all symbolically the mascots of other Belgian Pro League clubs – learn that the colors that they thought distinguished them from each other, actually give them so much more in common. 5,000 physical copies of the book were printed and given away. Over 55,000 people have read the story online and more than 4.8 million people were reached through social media channels. Along with the recognition at the conference, Club Brugge also won a fully club-branded mini-pitch system powered by new EFDN partner Musco Lighting. Club Brugge claimed the victory over four other shortlisted projects from Legia Warsaw, Borussia Dortmund, the Belgian Pro League and Malmö FF. For more on the award and shortlisted projects, visit the morethanfootball.eu website.
STEM Education Programme Launch
We also took the EFDN Conference as an opportunity to announce our new partnership with Sphero. The partnership was established to strengthen the EFDN STEM Network programme launched in 2019 and will continue to develop new methods of implementation for the EFDN STEM Education programme, for which EFDN received financial support from the UEFA Foundation for Children also in November. On the 28th of January, we will host our first virtual EFDN STEM Network Conference to share information on STEM education and membership to the EFDN STEM Network.
Member News
Bohemian FC’s best-selling jersey, which features the “Refugees Welcome” and “Love Football, Hate Racism” slogans, was launched on EA’s FIFA 2021 videogame.
GNK Dinamo Zagreb presented their official foundation on the 23rd of November.
PSV Eindhoven joined forces with Brainport Eindhoven to introduce young students to technological education and the world of professional sports in a new way.
