Luc te Riele, CSR Manager of N.E.C. Nijmegen: ‘Social activities are deeply embedded in the club’s DNA’
Newly promoted Dutch side and EFDN member N.E.C. Nijmegen hosted Greek EFDN associate OFI Crete in a preseason friendly on International Friendship Day. Luc te Riele, CSR Manager at N.E.C. Nijmegen, talks about friendship in football, the club’s social history and reveals the new project plans for the upcoming season.
EFDN: We are here to celebrate International Friendship Day. What does Friendship mean to you and how important is it in football?
Luc te Riele: ‘It’s very important! Friendship helps you to develop yourself socially. I also think it is really important in the social and mental development of a child. Here at N.E.C. Maatschappelijk we encourage kids to play together in a team, we put them together with other kids so they can grow as a person and as a team. They bond and create friendships around the football pitch. These friendships help them to be in contact with people and for instance to choose a school based on the peers they have at the football club. Personally, it also means a lot to me in my own life to go out playing football with my friends. Football brings us together.’
You have been to our EFDN conferences and hosted EFDN Youth Exchange in the past. Did it help you to build up relationships or friendships within the network?
‘Definitely, especially with colleagues from other Dutch clubs we met during the conferences. We spent two or three days together and that creates a bond. That’s really important cause this makes it easier to reach out and contact each other about different topics and projects. When I see an interesting project at PSV Eindhoven, I can call them right away cause I know them from the network meetings. I also saw that after the Youth Exchanges, the participating kids are still in touch with each other. These friendships might even last for the rest of their lives! A kid from Aberdeen still comes over to the Netherlands to visit friends here in Nijmegen. Those are great stories! It shows what football can do.’
N.E.C. Nijmegen earned promotion to the Dutch Eredivisie and will participate with a team in the ‘Bijzondere Eredivisie, the Special Eredivisie, a competition for children with a disability. Which other activities have you planned for the next season?
‘We are going to start with the ‘Football Memories’ project, which is a great programme. We also plan to initialise blood donation, for which we are in contact with EFDNmember Club Brugge who started this already. So that’s also the outcome of a EFDN related connection. We will also start a Vitality project for companies with organisations in and around Nijmegen.‘
How do the current Covid-19 restrictions affect your work at this moment?
‘We can’t use any players for our activities at this point. We have to protect them and other people. We really hope that by September we can pick up some more activities and get back to a bit more normal social life as by then most people, who wanted, will be vaccinated.’
Can you explain why N.E.C. is #Morethanfootball?
‘That’s something we can relate to the history of the place we are currently standing. The stadium of N.E.C. Nijmegen is commonly known as the ‘Bloedkuul’, which means the blood pit. This venue is situated in a big park, called De Goffert. We have to go back to the 30ies of last century when more than 160 unemployed people worked on the construction of the Goffertpark with shovels and wheelbarrows as a social project. There was a lot of unemployment in the area and the government started this project to keep these people busy. The toughest job of the construction was digging the pit in front of the stadium, which is where the nickname ‘the blood pit’ comes from, as the guys had blood blisters on their hands from digging with the shovels. The stadium could seat back then 30,000 people and had not only a football pitch but also a 440-metre long cycling track and a 436-metre cinder track. From 1945, this stadium became the home ground of football club N.E.C. So this is a historical place and it shows that CSR related projects are deeply embedded in our DNA and our blood. These social programmes are one of the pillars of our club, it’s in our heart and that makes it very natural to us. It is really a part of our strategy.’
Check here N.E.C. Nijmegen’s member page.
Find here to read the interviews related to International Friendship Day with Minas Lysandrou, CEO of OFI Crete FC and the Dutch OFI Crete FC players
