New Partnership to Improve Health with Healthy Stadia

New Partnership to Improve Health with Healthy Stadia

A new partnership between the European Football Development Network and the European Healthy Stadia Network (Healthy Stadia) is set to increase the number of football clubs involved in the promotion of healthy lifestyles, and by doing so help reduce incidence of chronic diseases within local populations. With a memorandum of understanding recently signed between both organisations, this new collaboration will be officially launched at the forthcoming EFDN annual conference to be held at Old Trafford, home of Manchester United FC, on 24^th and 25^th March, where the primary theme for the conference will be ‘Scoring For Health and Wellbeing’.

Healthy Stadia is a UK-based social enterprise operating across 13 European countries and is part-funded by the World Heart Federation through its partnership with UEFA’s Football and Social Responsibility Department. With 200+ members in the Network, Healthy Stadia provides its member clubs and organisations with guidance documents (e.g. active travel; development of smoke-free stadium policies), provides on-site benchmarking for clubs and stadium managers, and disseminates case studies of current practice.

Great opportunity to share examples of good practice, guidance documents and latest developments across both Networks

Football clubs and their stadia offer a unique environment to support the delivery of social interventions, including a wide range of projects aimed at improving health and wellbeing. Such interventions have grown steadily across European clubs over the last 5-10 years, and are of benefit to fans on a match-day and local communities, whilst supporting the corporate objectives of clubs themselves. The decision for Healthy Stadia and EFDN to work together is a natural one. Not only do both organisations have the same objective of using sport to contribute to positive social change at European level, but there are major opportunities to share examples of good practice, guidance documents and latest developments across both Networks.

Matthew Philpott, Director of Healthy Stadia stated: “We are delighted to be working with EFDN, as it gives us the opportunity to share latest guidance and case studies on health and wellbeing with clubs who are already involved in wider social projects. We are particularly keen to provide assistance to clubs and stadium operators on how they can develop their venues as ‘health promoting environments’ that are complementary to community health projects”

Commenting on this new collaboration, Hubert Rovers, EFDN Chair, said: “We are excited to team up with an organization such as Healthy Stadia. They have an enormous amount of expertise in this field which will be very beneficial for our member clubs, their fans and the people that participate in the community programmes of these clubs. This cooperation is very important for us, as I strongly believe that this cooperation will further enhance the quality of the already high quality health projects and activities currently delivered by our members.”