How can we create healthy digital communities for grassroots football players to challenge them to play more football and eat better?
About the challenge
We want to stimulate the engagement and well-being of (young) grassroots football players, whether they are already a member of a club or would like to start playing football independently. We want to create new, as well as strengthen the current football (digital) communities. We want to contribute to talent development, fun, health and well-being of this football community. We want to stimulate better eating and provide technical solutions to achieve this.
Wider football engagement is important to us. Therefore, we challenge the world of start-ups, scale-ups and established organizations to help us reach groups of football enthusiasts (such as grassroots players, street football players or digital football communities) and provide them with a means to get together, form a community, and contribute to their health and well-being by stimulating movement, exercise, and influence them to choose for healthier food options. Digital solutions that help individual players meet like-minded people to play with, help us creating more football activity and grow the sport.
What are we looking for?
We are looking for (technological) solutions that connect football players, for instance by creating a digital community. Solutions could facilitate self-training or organizing football activities, be interactive, and focus on activity outside of the football club context. To spread the football experience to all players with a desire to join a football community, the solution should be accessible for both members and non-members of a club or federation. We are open to solutions that have been used with professional players, which can also be applied to amateur football. Additionally, we are looking for platform solutions that can help us offer individualized content to fans, and/or on which they can interact with the federation or club.
Additionally, we are looking to strengthen the current football communities by using data to retain grassroots players and reducing dropout. We are also looking for solutions that improve the enrollment and registration of new grassroots players through a more valuable process.
The solutions that we search should be able to tackle the lack of movement/exercise for kids, let them play more football and/or eat better, and/or let them interact with each other and the federation/club. Platform solutions should be able to integrate with our current digital environment and stimulate social interaction, both digitally and physically.
We are looking for solutions that are ready to be implemented, for example in collaboration with local partners or commercial sponsors.
Issues to consider
- Solutions must be tangible and create measurable value
- Time-to-implement is preferably short-to-medium term
- Solutions must be possible to integrate within existing web- and mobile applications
- Cost efficiency (regarding set-up costs as well as ongoing costs) is key to enable implementation of the solution for a broader range of (professional) clubs and leagues
- All solutions must be compliant with GDPR
- Appropriate measures with regards to cyber security must be in place
What we are not looking for
- Just an online platform with football exercises for kids to do at home (individual)
- ‘Regular’ competition organization and player administration software
