Photo Volunteers and Street Soccer USA alumni played during a league match at Brooklyn Bridge Park on Oct. 1.Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times
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On Oct. 19, soccer players from 46 countries will gather in Santiago, Chile, for eight days of matches. There will be parades, flags, tens of thousands of cheering spectators, dignitaries, plenty of TV cameras — even groupies.
Unlike the World Cup that concluded in Brazil in July, this tournament takes place every year in a different city. It includes both men and women. Games are 14 minutes long. And all the players are homeless.
Soccer is good for kids. It builds discipline, perseverance, trust, confidence and teamwork. Children need these things — but homeless adults need them even more.
"Football is a very simple game about inclusion," said Mel Young, the president of the Homeless World Cup. Young, a Scot, was a publisher of newspapers sold by the homeless. He and Harald Schmied, a publisher from Austria, came up with the idea at a street paper convention in 2001. "Normally, our people are isolated, have very low self-esteem, very low self-respect," Young said. "They are by necessity very selfish, thinking only about how will I get to tomorrow? How will I sleep? What will I eat?
"But they have to turn up to be part of a team. They have to pass balls to each other. There are coaches, they provide each other some support. As soon as you start playing football, you forget you're homeless."
The Homeless World Cup is not just for the 500 people who will play in Santiago. The international competition has given rise to soccer programs for homeless adults in countries around the world, with their own national tournaments. (Children compete in a different tournament, the Street Child World Cup.) In the United States, the tournament's partner is Street Soccer USA, founded in 2004 in Charlotte, N.C., by Lawrence Cann, a college soccer player who now lives in New York.
Street Soccer USA now has teams in 16 cities. In New York City, the program works with about 40 participants at any one time, Cann said. They practice or play three times a week.
As in other countries, the program tries to help participants on and off the soccer pitch. As a group, players do volunteer projects or go to job fairs. Individually, they get connected to drug treatments, immigration lawyers, mentors, job coaches and G.E.D. tutors. Christopher Lodgson, who started playing while he was homeless in 2009, said that when he was just out of the shelter — a dangerous time, as many people fall back in — his support system was built around Street Soccer. "I'm talking about daily phone calls, in-person visits, meetings over coffee," he said.
Coaches — many of whom are alumni of the program — meet with participants weekly to set and work on three-month, six-month and one-year goals. "Everyone wants employment and housing," Cann said. "We back it down to little steps, so people have the feeling of accomplishing stuff toward their goal. A three-month goal may be I need to get my college credits together I've accumulated and apply. Or get my security license back for a security job." No progress means no play.
Photo Dennis Diaz in Brooklyn on Oct. 1.Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times
Two years ago, Dennis Diaz was just out of prison, living in a shelter on Wards Island. He found out about Street Soccer through the Doe Fund's much-copied transitional work program, Ready, Willing and Able. Although he had never played soccer in his life, he was intrigued. The first day he was nervous, and left practice hurting — "I fell a lot," he said. But he was hooked. "I was going through a lot of stress, and it blocked everything away," he said.
He turned out to be good enough to make Street Soccer's national team, and went to the Homeless World Cup in Poznan, Poland, last year.
I met Diaz last week at a Street Soccer match in Brooklyn Bridge Park. He is short, 24 years old, with long black hair he gathered in a ponytail for the game. He now has an apartment in Brooklyn and a job as a security guard at the Doe Fund. He's planning to study to become a paramedic.
One of the men who helped and inspired him, Diaz said, was Donnie Nicholson, who volunteers with Street Soccer and was filling in at the game last week as a coach and player. Nicholson is now a photographer and database manager, a man in his late 30s who exudes confidence. In 2010, however, trying to kick a cocaine addiction and change his life, he got on a bus in his native Texas and came to New York, knowing no one.
He hadn't kicked a ball in 10 years when he saw the banners for Street Soccer at his Wards Island shelter. "I was out of shape from drugs and cigarettes, coughing, bad knees, bad legs, bad ankles," he said. But he had dreamed as a kid of playing in the World Cup. "I found out about the Homeless World Cup," he said. "And after the first night of practice, I said, 'Wouldn't that be nice.'" Over the next three years, he said, he didn't miss more than two weeks of practice — and he did play in the Homeless World Cup, in Mexico City.
Photo Donnie Nicholson at a practice in Brooklyn on Oct. 1.Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times
How did soccer help him? "It was a way to occupy my time, to not acknowledge the thirst for drugs," he said. "It was a way to meet new people. New York is a scary place for a newbie. But I knew soccer as a language since I was 6 years old. As I gained trust, I could ask people, 'Any ideas about what I can do with my day? Any ideas about where I could stay?' " One team member connected him to a landlord in the Rockaways who rented him an apartment — where he still lives.
The Homeless World Cup has a budget of about $700,000. With that, it gets players to the host city, which then takes over all expenses — and cities compete to host. It also raises money to help national programs in some poor countries.
More important, it's a framework for the national and local programs all over the world. In Minneapolis, Hani Haybe runs a program whose players are largely girls from Somalia. Daniel Copto, an addictions counselor who had emigrated from Mexico to Toronto, came across Canada's Street Soccer program and began coaching. He saw the program's impact on his clients, and decided to move his family back to Mexico to establish Street Soccer there. Copto lived off his savings from 2006 until 2009, when Fundación Telmex adopted the program. Last year, it worked with 26,600 homeless or otherwise marginalized people across Mexico.
All over the world, people tell stories of how Street Soccer changed their lives. But how representative are these stories?
The programs are very difficult to evaluate formally. Well-designed studies are expensive, following up with homeless people is challenging and you need a long time to be able to say anything conclusive. So the Homeless World Cup and Street Soccer programs usually interview players to ask how the program affects them.
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The Homeless World Cup used to ask participants (PDF, tables on Page 16) six months out whether they had found housing or a job, or gotten sober. Between one-third and one-half reported improving their housing, getting a job or continuing their education — not necessarily the same group each time, so the people who report improving their lives in some way is considerably higher. They stopped the surveys in 2008 because the numbers were so consistent, Young said.
Street Soccer USA also surveys participants: Jon Welty Peachey, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, conducts periodic surveys of participants six months after they leave the program. He said that around two out of three make big changes in their lives.
This isn't very reliable evidence. There's no control group — so people might have improved their lives without the soccer programs. Diaz, for example, was already in Ready, Willing and Able. There's selection bias: It's easier to track down successful people than unsuccessful ones for follow-ups, and the programs themselves most likely attract the people most committed to change. The data is self-reported, and interviewers, like journalists, tend to get a lot of the clichés participants think they should say.
And six months is not forever, particularly with the homeless. "We know particularly well with a lot of people we work with that it's three steps forward, two steps back," Young said. "Lives are chaotic."
We romanticize sports, and their effects. Yes, sports can raise self-esteem. But as any parent knows, playing soccer might have the opposite effect on a kid who's not very good. One fascinating study details the observations of a researcher who served as a coach for a team in Britain and went with them to the Homeless World Cup in Graz, Austria. Many of the men had gotten involved because of the lure of the overseas trip. Once there, however, they were repeatedly humiliated on the field — just one more thing to fail at. Many drank heavily throughout the tournament, "culminating in a 30-hour-long drinking binge" when the matches ended.
Street Soccer USA found its national competition had the same problems. Welty Peachey said that the organization changed the rules a bit to try to emphasize achievements other than victory on the field. Referees, for example, now award players green cards for acts of sportsmanship. In a tie, the team with the most green cards wins.
Photo The group prepared for the match in Brooklyn.Credit Byron Smith for The New York Times
The Street Soccer team at the match I attended last week consisted almost entirely of volunteers and program alumni. The regular team members had been temporarily banned from play; a group of them had ganged up on and teased another team member. "We thought it would be good to make a strong statement," Cann wrote in an email. No doubt — but it does illustrate the difficulties of working with the homeless.
That the evidence is weak, of course, doesn't mean the program is. To the contrary — it's probably very effective. One of soccer's advantages over more traditional programs for the homeless is that you don't have to drag people onto the soccer pitch. "Soccer got my attention," said Lodgson, who is now working as an accountant — one of his jobs is to manage Street Soccer's finances — and planning to get an M.B.A. "When you're in these homeless shelters, one of the things you hate the most is down time. You're just sitting there." Homeless people often have serious problems such as addiction, trauma and mental illness. Soccer isn't enough to solve them. But it keeps people coming back again and again — and as long as they keep coming back, they can keep getting other help.
There's another way soccer is unique — not for the participants, but for the rest of us. How else do you get the great cities of the world to compete to bring in homeless people? How else could you encourage people in cafes to stand and applaud when a group of the homeless passes by? The Homeless World Cup and Street Soccer humanize a group that is often dehumanized, and therefore forgotten. "People who see the pictures say they didn't know the players were homeless," Young said. "That's the idea."
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Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book "The Haunted Land: Facing Europe's Ghosts After Communism." She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of "Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World" and the World War II spy story e-book "D for Deception."
