Football Beyond the Pitch
Steve Fleming of Kick4Life on Transforming Lives and Communities
by Hector Moyeton
The sport industry first and foremost focuses on performance and competition. But there’s a strong business-oriented mindset as well. Although this industry’s mindset has been successful in attracting more people to sport, it tends to overlook great opportunities to channel the energy towards societal good.
Sporting bodies, corporations, and athletes can all positively contribute to social change by drawing on their unique connection to the sporting industry, whether it is through their consumer market, the community that fosters their athletic success, or the policies they establish for the ecosystem.
We interviewed Steve Fleming, Co-Founder of Kick4Life, a unique football (soccer) club based in Lesotho. Kick4Life’s goal is to transform the lives and long-term prospects of young people through a wide range of social development activities focused on health, education, and support towards sustainable livelihoods. He is also the author of Radical Football, a book that presents a hopeful vision for football’s future.
Steve’s work demonstrates that it is possible to unite fans, players, administrators, and innovators in a collective mission to unleash the power of football for the benefit of people and the planet.
Q: How do you describe what you do to a general audience?
Steve: At Kick4Life we use football as a tool to address the multiple and overlapping challenges facing children and young people in Lesotho in Southern Africa. This includes delivering football-based education and personal development programs related to topics including health, gender, and employability.
In doing so, our aim is to equip young people with the skills and knowledge they need to reach their potential, with the opportunity to achieve sustainable livelihoods and contribute to the development of their own communities.
Football is a vital ingredient that enables us to effectively engage young people, to support their development of transferable skills, and to provide motivation for them to adopt health behaviors and work towards a brighter future. We are a football club committed to social change and strive to bridge the gap between the football industry and the Sport for Development sector. This model enables us to change lives off the pitch as well as leading systemic change in the industry, and in 2020 we became the first top-flight club in the world to commit to gender equal budgets.
Our model has also evolved beyond the pitch. At our center in Maseru, Lesotho’s capital city, we run several hospitality social enterprises — a restaurant, hotel & small conference center — which ensure long-term sources of income for our work and provide employment and training opportunities for young people coming through our programs. This has linked our income and delivery models, strengthening the sustainability of our funding and our social impact.
Q: What have been the biggest challenges you’ve faced in building a purpose-driven football club, and where is Kick4Life going in the future?
Steve: During the Covid-19 pandemic we made the transition to fully local leadership in Lesotho. The pandemic was an enormous challenge that was an existential threat to the organization, particularly with our social enterprises which had to close overnight. It necessitated several changes that resulted in appointing our first Mosotho Country Director and having our first fully Basotho Senior Management Team.
These changes have had many positive impacts for on Kick4Life related to culture, authenticity, and innovation. I’m proud of how we worked together to get through the challenges of the pandemic, with support from our funders, protecting the livelihoods of our team and maintaining support for our participants through adapted program delivery.
For fifteen years we have had a vision of further developing our center in Lesotho into a small football stadium purpose-built for social change. During that period, we experienced numerous setbacks, but we believed in the potential of the project and were resilient in pursuing it, eventually securing funding. The Stadium of Life — constructed from sustainably sourced timber — is now under development, and we have successfully brought together some excellent and innovative partnerships to make it happen. Some relevant announcements are coming soon!
There is so much happening at Kick4Life right now, with the development of the Stadium of Life, and the continued delivery of our community programs as well as operating our social enterprises. We also always have an eye on the future, and we see the continued growth of women’s football as a key part of this.
As such, we want to continue playing our part in growing women’s sport and in using this as a platform to promote wider social change related to gender equality and women’s rights. Our structure at Kick4Life is designed for us to achieve this, as an organization which combines and connects, through purpose, the Sport for Good and the elite sporting sectors. We believe there is a huge need, and opportunity, for the wider sporting industry to recognize the potential for positive transformation by putting purpose at the core of its approach.
Q: What mindset shift needs to happen for everyone in the sports ecosystem to embrace this purpose and play a role for social good?
Steve: When I wrote Radical Football two years ago, we invited a ‘Radical XI’ of creative thinkers in the football industry to put forward their views and ideas for how we can change the sport for the better, and to make it more purpose-driven. The theme that came through most strongly was representation in governance, and the potential to restructure the boards of governing bodies, clubs, and rights holders so that a far greater diversity of stakeholders can contribute to decision-making that represents everyone.
With its enormous popularity and influence, there is so much potential for sport and football to drive positive change and to change attitudes across wider society, on topics such as race and gender. But with the same homogenous groups dominating decision-making, it is currently falling short.
As Jürgen Griesbeck, founder of Common Goal, likes to say, “‘All we need is everyone.” It is a neat way of expressing the nature of football as a team game on and off the pitch, and the necessity for everyone to play their part if we are to achieve success. That’s what Common Goal is all about, uniting the whole football ecosystem to collaborate in driving positive change, including players, fans, administrators, businesses, the media.
Everyone has a part to play, and at Kick4Life we are one of many community member organizations around the world who are using football to achieve social impact. Although we often compete against each other for funding, we ultimately regard these organizations as teammates, because we are collectively pursuing shared end goals of a better world, with football as our chosen vehicle for achieving social impact across topics such as improved health, gender equality, and more opportunities for education and employment. Imagine the scale of impact that could be realized if the whole football ecosystem collaborated in the same way! This is the framework of radical collaboration that Common Goal is striving to build.
Kick4Life is also working to build new creative links within the football industry in other parts of the world to further demonstrate and celebrate the power of football as a unifying force, as well as a vehicle for changing lives. This includes a new club twinning partnership with Wrexham AFC in Wales that seeks to foster international cooperation and exchange between two community-focused football clubs in Europe and Africa. The club twinning builds on a national twinning between Wales in the United Kingdom, and Lesotho in Southern Africa, which was born at a meeting in Wrexham in 1984, based on similarities between the two nations related to size, landscape, population, bilingualism, and cultural heritage.
The club twinning partnership is an extension of this national twinning, and we now look forward to working with Wrexham to strengthen our collective community impact, with coaching exchanges, jointly promoting women’s football, and co-development and delivery of a new ‘Football for Good’ curriculum covering health, education, social inclusion, and employability.
This article is part of our “Sport for Changemaking” series — a collection of articles that examine how Ashoka Fellows around the world are utilizing sports to create impact and mobilize change. The series showcases the potential of sports as a tool for social transformation and provide insights into strategies, impact, challenges, and lessons learned. Sign up for our newsletter and stay up to date with Ashoka’s Sport for Changemaking initiative.
