EDUcation for Dual Careers of football talents

ongoing

The ‘EDUcation for Dual Careers of football talents (EDU-DC)’ project aims at empowering talented football players from 16 to 21 years old in Europe by developing their dual careers (DC). The main goal of this integrated approach targeting both women and men players will be achieved by reinforcing the capacities of DC Coordinators and important staff members (football coaches, manager of Academies, life skills coaches and career counsellors / study coaches) from European Football Federations & Clubs through a comprehensive & holistic Educational Programme tackling the diverse dimensions of the DCs and by testing several Pilot Actions by engaging football federations & clubs across 4 EU countries. DCs are tackled through different angles, following a holistic approach that covers sports performance, education, employability, wellbeing, life skills & competencies, identity development and financial skills. The partnership will create an online Educational Programme to train 20 DC Coordinators appointed by the 4 Football Associations and by 16 football clubs cooperating with EDU-DC. These trained staff will then transfer the knowledge on a successful DC management to 200 coaches and 60 specialists from the ecosystem of the participating organisations. The EDU-DC approach has been conceived to combine theoretical learnings with practical actions, and thus a set of pilot activities engaging 400 football players will happen to test the new acquired knowledge. Once completed the course, 280 staff & 400 players will have then experimented a strong collaboration to achieve a common goal: creating a sound and robust DC environment in the targeted sports organisations fruit of a collaborative work. EDU-DC will scale-up the project results by disseminating the key project outputs in at least 2 international capitalisation events; these outputs will be openly & freely accessible. EDU-DC is led by KNVB and has BFU, DBU, FAI, EMCA and VUB as partners.