The Homeless World Cup: A Former Champions League Player and a Social Entrepreneur on Soccer's Transformative Power

The Assistant Professor of Football: Soccer, Culture, History.

When I was High School, Sturm Graz, one of the two teams of my hometown in Austria and the club I was born into, had its most successful phase. We made it to the CL group phase twice - and eventually went bankrupt from it. One of the protagonists was a young, serious-looking player from our own youth system who was known to be not your stereotypical soccer player. We were aware that he had a love for languages and philosophy. During the same period, in 2003, also in Graz, the first Homeless World Cup took place, on the city’s main square: 18 nations, 8 homeless players each, streetsoccer style on a small pitch. The tournament, its founders argue, has “The power to transform the lives of participants, and shape attitudes towards homelessness." I would argue it also has the power to recenter the attitudes of soccer fans like us towards the power of the beautiful game. We hear from one of these founders today, Mel Young, a social entrepreneur from Edinburgh, Scotland who is president of the HWC til today. We also hear from that young, serious Sturm Graz player I watched growing up: his name is Gilbert Prilasnig, he now coaches Sturm’s under 18, but it turns out he began his coaching career at the Austrian Homeless World Cup national team, already during his active career as a player. He still coaches the HWC team now, making him Austria’s longest tenured national team coach.
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HELPFUL LINKS FOR THE EPISODE:
Homeless World Cup website
HWC on Wikipedia, with statistics on every tournament
2023 Homeless World Cup in Sacramento, CA
New York Times on the 2023 HWC
UEFA obituary for Harald Schmied, HWC Co-Founder from Graz, Austria
The Big Issue (streetpaper) on 20 years HWC
Mel Young's website
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Artwork for The Assistant Professor of Football is by Saige Lind
Instrumental music for this podcast, including the introduction track, is by the artist Ketsa and used under a Creative Commons license through Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Ketsa/