Of the five billion people watching the European Championships this summer, the vast majority may not realise that they are, in fact, watching philanthropists on the pitch. 

Football and philanthropy have been inextricably linked since the birth of the beautiful game.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, organised football (or soccer) was born from the workplace – a burning desire for Britain’s working class to escape the harsh realities of a six-day week in Britain’s industrial heartlands.

John Hope, a pioneering philanthropist in Edinburgh, Scotland, set up what could be the first football club in the world (multiple British clubs and cities stake their claim).  Convinced of the health benefits of outdoors recreation, Hope spent £100 – a sizeable sum for that era – to lease a plot of sheep grazing land for the city’s budding footballers to play on. This was, by his Christian-focused intent, an act of philanthropy to move young working-class men (and almost exclusively men), many of them unemployed, off the crime-filled streets of urban Edinburgh.

In doing so, he invited Scotland’s poor into outdoors recreation, health and fostered community. Hope even provided rules on how pitches should be marked, or how a goal should be scored between posts.

Today, the roles have reversed. Thanks to sky-high salaries, sponsorships, and broadcasting revenues, modern football has spawned a globally outward, politically progressive band of multi-millionaires turning themselves into individual grantmakers and champions for social causes. Call them the ‘player-philanthropist’, or the ‘footballer philanthropist’.

African uptick

The modern footballer, particularly in the men’s game, takes a route not too dissimilar to their forebears in the 19^th century; starting life from low-income and/or immigrant families, living on the fringes of urban sprawl and poverty, picked up by the world’s elite football clubs and eventually making their way into becoming high-net-wealth individuals.

Mo Salah, Liverpool’s Egyptian superstar, ranked eighth in the Sunday Times Giving List in 2022. Salah distributes six percent of his wealth towards philanthropic activities, including £2.4 million to the National Cancer Institute in Cairo in 2019 – part of what the Times says is ‘one of several interventions in his homeland’. In October last year, Salah appealed for humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza after donating to help those affected by Israeli air strikes.

Sadio Mane, Salah’s former Liverpool teammate, started life in a Senegalese village. He’s reported to have distributed a stipend of 70 euros a month, the equivalent of the minimum wage in Senegal, for every family in his old neighbourhood with a population of 2,000 people.

Both Mane and Salah are devout Muslims and, like their philanthropic forebear, practitioners of their faith through distributing income and resources. Their performances on and off the field have indirect social consequences; Islamophobia and hate crimes in Liverpool has significantly reduced. Thanks, in part, to philanthropy, football and faith, combined.

However, critics suggest football’s role in developing Africa could be a reboot of neoliberal systems.

‘Football is a passion in Uganda. It is a powerful way to mobilise people in post-conflict areas such as Katine (south Uganda), where there has been civil war and insurgency over the past 20 years,’ says Kate Manzo, a senior lecturer at Newcastle University and author of Development through football in Africa: Neoliberal and postcolonial models of community development.

A 2009 football tournament in Katina, Uganda, sponsored by the UK’s Guardian newspaper and Barclays Bank, is a prime example of how developments of philanthropy, media and private capital flows show that ‘neo liberalism is alive and well’. Football is no exception.

‘It’s tempting to conclude [therefore] that not much ever changes in international development, and that football is no more than a magnet with which to draw young people deeper into the operational orbit of NGOs and their donors,’ adds Manzo.

Commercialisation and social good

Despite football’s philanthropic origins, the idea that football clubs established foundations as legally separate entities but within the orbit of the club’s work is only a modern phenomenon.

Leyton Orient Community Sports Organisation in London became the first to open as a separate charitable group away from the football club in 1997. Professional clubs boasting millions in revenue took their time to follow. Arsenal FC, after decades of community work within a local area blighted by poverty, formally established its grant-giving foundation in 2012.

FIFA, football’s global governing body with revenues of $7.5 billion between 2019-2022, only established its foundation in 2018.  Mark Panton, a lecturer and author in football and society, says it was around the mid noughties that the idea of corporate social responsibility took a hold – a concept with influences from, once again, 19^th century Scotland.

Renowned economist Adam Smith believed that business owners, in the pursuit of profit, will ultimately align themselves towards doing social good ‘because of the invisible hand of the marketplace’.

Football clubs taking an interest in their local communities is now viewed as a source of competitive advantage that ‘might assist the firm to become profitable’, says Panton.

In other words, philanthropic work ‘may even warrant a valuation on the balance sheet’, which ‘would support the arguments used by the Football Association and the Premier League that clubs are at the heart of their communities’.

‘Football should be able to provide evidence of its claims about its role in the community,’ adds Panton.

That is perhaps showcased in two ways. One is football’s growing commercial relations with philanthropy. In the first decade of the 2000s, six of the world’s 10 richest football clubs partnered with nonprofit programmes or high finance foundations. Among them, Barcelona FC signed an advertisement deal in 2011 with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to highlight polio vaccines among stadium advertisements.

Secondly, and more recently, is the role of celebrity wealthy ownership lifting smaller football clubs with historic roles in their community. None more infamously than Wrexham, a small Welsh club and the third oldest professional club in the world. A £2 million takeover by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney in 2020 has been portrayed as more than just a business deal.

‘Wrexham has gone from being a small club, with local community support, to one with a global cult following,’ says Chris Carr, analyst at Battenhall, a communications consultancy.

Wrexham signed a deal with Disney to air a documentary series at the tune of £430,000 per episode. The club’s social media channels – in follower count and engagement – are on a par with some of the world’s biggest clubs.

Can philanthropy learn anything from Reynolds and McElhenney?  ‘Wrexham’s social strategy shows that it’s not just about having celebrity influence, it’s about compelling storytelling with real people and emotion at its heart,’ says Carr.

The story of the underdog, with authentic voices and galvanizing locals, sounds familiar in the philanthropic sphere. Football doesn’t just hold lessons for philanthropy. Perhaps, it mimics philanthropy’s myriad structures.

Shafi Musaddique is the news editor at Alliance Magazine