Driving Growth
and Development
The Driving Growth and Development work stream was established to look in-depth at areas essential to the social role and sustainability of professional football clubs, such as youth development, women’s football and social impact issues. Redefining the European landscape for youth club football and delivering projects aimed at developing the women’s game are essential to the future of football and will become fundamental to our work over the coming years.
The past year has been unlike any other from both health and economic perspectives. In addition to the impacts of COVID-19, societal issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change and gender equality, have been at the forefront of conversations around the world. It’s our responsibility, as European football clubs, to address these issues and see how our game can contribute to positive social change in the long term.
The ECA Youth Working Group defined its mandate for the current
membership cycle around the following pillars:
Governance and regulations,
including a more protected
environment for training clubs
Competitions and development, thus further increasing
the number of international
youth competitions
and potentially reforming
the UEFA Youth League.
Knowledge sharing, including
facilitating club visits and
looking into the use of
new technology and sport
science in youth development.
As our Fan of the Future publication highlighted, fans expect clubs to play a role in their communities to help make the world a better place. Our members are all heavily engaged in social impact initiatives aimed at using their influence to support efforts that contribute to social causes. At the same time, we’re building a collective approach that allows our members to collaborate around common causes and campaigns. During lockdowns across the globe, clubs came together on social media to help find vulnerable young people on International Missing Children’s Day in May 2020.
Nearly 100 ECA member clubs volunteered to use their social media channels to support an initiative set up by the International Centre for Missing & Exploited Children by sharing videos featuring children missing from all over the world. Moving forward, we’ll look to identify other causes in which members can collectively involve themselves and contribute to making a difference.
