As part of a larger research project with Dr Stuart Whigham at Oxford Brookes University, we spent a week in Budapest at the end of May 2024 to gain insight into the everyday affairs of an organisation that uses sport, especially football, as a means for social inclusion. The organisation aims to improve quality of life for disadvantaged adults and youth through sport engagement, and has a long history of working towards bridging the cultural and social gaps between those communities which are and have been in conflict with each other.
In their mission they support a broad range of communities from children in state care, young offenders and refugees. Each of those groups, in some shape or form, are generally underserved by the state and lack prospects in general, and sporting opportunities, in particular. The organisation has been working for over two decades to fill some of the sporting inequality gaps and, generally, uphold the view that sport is a useful means for social inclusion. We were particularly keen to see this credo in action as one of our main research questions revolves around sport being an avenue towards social cohesion.
We believe exploring the impact of social activities that have the potential to bring communities together is of great importance in our contemporary societies. We have a plethora of conflicts and opposing communities, such as the ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Palestine, Ukraine and Russia, and the ever-growing Western Christian suspicion towards the followers of Islam, to name but a few. While these conflicts all have their roots in history, they have been brought to the fore by current events which have significantly deepened the fissures.
Political propaganda and populism have been a major contributor to amplifying conflicts, creating socially divisive circumstances and ‘culture wars’ for personal or party gains. Hungary is one of those countries, where the prime minister’s, Victor Orbán, ’strong man’ (and straight man) politics have led to some sort of moral panic about refugees and the Western LGBTI+ movement. Orbán’s rethoric has been clear on such matters, which has had a significant impact on public perceptions towards foreigners and members of the LGBTI+ community. Therefore, we were keen to see how a charitable oranisation that works against the political current operate and use sport as a platform for social inclusion.
The week was eventful, and we had multiple opportunities to engage with a range of activities. On Monday, we attended an EU-funded project meeting which was within the remit of Green Awareness in Action (GAIA) and offered insight into an international collaboration between like-minded organisations. Securing funding is a recurring challenge for most charitable societies, especially those which do not receive any form of state support and are therefore exclusively reliant on donations and successful grant applications. Such economic precariousness has the tendency to present numerous challenges around programme planning and delivery.
However, financial support is not the only challenge to tackle. We learnt that having suitable spaces for training sessions is another fundamental hurdle for the organisation to overcome. While the Hungarian government have extensively invested in sport facilities over the years, those are predominantly available for elite athletes and high-profile sporting events. This means that children and youth who wish to play recreationally – not considered sufficiently talented to join a club and/or unable to afford to play for the privilege of training sessions – are not only priced out but also ‘spaced out’ of sporting opportunities. While some state-funded care institutions have rudimentary sport courts, training venues for other groups can be challenging to book and arrange in advance.
We visited two state-funded care institutions on Tuesday and Thursday, which had football courts, one of which was cinder-based and the other concrete-surfaced. Neither are ideal. A cinder surface is slippery without studded boots (children in state care struggle to have their basic needs met and, thus, can hardly afford studded boots), can be dusty, and badly graze knees and elbows when someone trips. Concrete surfaces are no better when it comes to grazing knees and elbows, along with being extremely hot during the summer, and hard on the feet and other joints during a precarious phase of physical development. Nevertheless, none of the above issues stopped youngsters from playing and they were generally keen to chase the ball. Whilst the hard and slippery surfaces did not deter us adults from playing either, we did pay the price the days after as our aging bodies made its protest against further physical activity painfully obvious!
We also learnt that other playing venues are a bit more cumbersome to arrange. There seemed to be two possibilities. One was to use an open, public venue, and thus hope that it would be available for a pre-agreed training time or try to negotiate with people already using the facility to gain access to it. The second option was to try to pre-book a paid venue online. This seemed the most straightforward until it was explained that the booking opens only on the morning for when the booking can be made and by 6 am the court is normally fully booked. This further illustrated the lack of infrastructure for recreational and non-elite sports. Needless to say, none of the options are ideal and a long-term training venue would be desirable, but the children and youth playing were not deterred by such issues.
To gain further insight into the organisation’s work and its members’ perspectives around their sport programmes and their effectiveness, we had numerous conversations about how the organisation operates, to what extent sport functions as an instrument for social cohesion, and what challenges they face in a political climate that is conspicuously unsupportive of their work. Although the views of the people we talked to differed around some of the issues we raised, they generally agreed that sport, football in particular, has the potential to work as a means for social inclusion in the sporting arena as it brings people from different communities together to play and play by the same rules.
Thus, there seems to be sufficient evidence from this charitable organisation’s perspective that football works well an instrument for social cohesion during training and games when people from different communities interact and play. However, what is pressing to explore further is the impact of mixing communities beyond the sports arena, and this remains a challenge for critically assessing the long-term impact of projects and the important work organisations such as this are conducting.
