Children of Girueta and the Wastelands of Football for All - Andrei Mihail

Football can be more than a sport. Obviously, playing football can help improve the health of city dwellers. Accessible pitches, modernized facilities, or well-trained coaches can harness the sport’s popularity to get people to play it. But there is a further effect of football to consider. The beautiful game can strongly contribute to repairing the social health of the cities we live in. The football pitch has a unique ability to bring together people from different social backgrounds. Unfortunately, in twenty-first-century Bucharest, the chances that people from diverse backgrounds interact on the neighborhood football pitches are almost null. The rental prices or the costs of football training for children are prohibitive for a significant number of people, with this leading to a very high level of homogeneity of the sport. As my research on B ...