Football Makes History: Schools and Football Club Museums Unlocking Local Heritage education

We are a consortium of educators, researchers, heritage professionals, and civil society organizers who have collaborated since 2018—through various partnerships—on the Football Makes History platform. We view football history as a rich tapestry of stories: about individuals and communities, social movements, and broader historical developments. These stories offer powerful entry points for exploring pressing contemporary issues and envisioning more inclusive futures, including those related to gender equality, race and racism, and national identity. History teachers, heritage professionals, and football museums more often than not recognize the educational potential of football history, but they often need concrete examples and inspiration. This project responded to that need through teacher trainings, international exchanges, educational materials, and an evaluation tool. In other cases we needed to convince these sectors; and along the way got better in that. In this project we collaborated at the local level with one school (ZSTIO2) and one museum (Eintracht Frankfurt Museum) as best-practice examples to inspire others. These initiatives were professionally supported and embedded through collaborations with Erasmus University.

Our objectives were to: 1. Research existing local football club-school partnerships, monitor the development of the program and evaluate the effectiveness of the project results 2. Challenge school students and club heritage staff to uncover local conflicted histories that have a strong connection with their local football communities together; 3. Support football club museums to engage local education stakeholders and become a space for heritage education 4. Support teachers to replicate effective local approaches to co-design and storytelling in partnerships with football club museums. 5. Sustain and grow the European network of educators, historians, activists and football workers gathered in FMH, and together develop public awareness that inspires action on/with football heritage; The ultimate aim was to connect football heritage work and formal education to show the potential of collaboration and creating teaching material that would attract students to study history and social issues through the lens of football stories.

Transnational meetings with consortium: because of our diverse background we created online and physical spaces to interact and share experiences and background and discuss potentials and fallacies of the project Transnational meetings with (potential) stakeholders; we invited stakeholders and informed them about our ideas; we encouraged them to share their ideas and we tested the feasibility of our project. We created our website, a documentary and various social media storytelling engagements as tool of presentation, for interaction and to show best practices and potentials. Learning activities for football clubs as Heritage Institutions: we visited football clubs and (football) museums to see what they were doing and to exchange and present our ideas Learning activities for teachers: we started to do teaching training based on our ideas. First within the network but at the end of the project were asked to present. We created Impact events with (professional) football clubs implementing FMH outcomes We evaluated with students, teachers and heritage institutions the results of our ideas and activities

Teaching the teachers- trainings in various events. Overall we estimate that around 300 history teachers and heritage professionals have been trained by us in our program as well upon invitation by others. We have collaborated with over 20 amateur and professional football clubs and advised them to implement strategies to use their heritage museums to tell; stories about gender, race, migration, the role in World War 2 and the role of stadiums during disasters. Two partners (ZSIZTO2 and In Medias Res) produced content and professional relations that enabled local students to tell stories of local football club and heroes and make them relevant for larger audiences. This resulted in three short documentaries that were presented. The documentary Children of the Field had it first screening Paladino d’Oro Sports Film Festival in Palermo. We developed two toolkits: 1. A Methodological Toolkit for teachers to initiate local school-heritage collaborations. 2. A ‘Game Plan’ Toolkit for football clubs, featuring eight best practices in socially engaged heritage work, supported by posters and online content. Additionally, we created two evaluation tools: one for educators, and one for curators to assess impact and improve F