Football United, as part of the University of New South Wales (UNSW) School of Public Health and Community Medicine (SPHCM) successfully secured a Linkage Grant in 2009 through the Australian Research Council (ARC). The ground-breaking longitudinal study is the first of its kind globally to evaluate the impact of football and sport on social cohesion and community participation of refugee populations in urban areas.

Football United has five clear aims that the study hopes to achieve:

• First, to determine the impact of Football United on participants’ personal development, sense of self, physical, emotional, mental health and resilience.
• Second, to determine the impact of Football United on community capacity and social cohesion.
• Third, to document issues arising from implementation of the program in order to form future program implementation and replication of the intervention in other contexts.
• Fourth, to test innovative research methodologies that yield information about the way refugees negotiate with sport and Australian social expectations.
• Finally, to identify strategies to promote ethical community sporting intervention programs.

In order to determine the effectiveness of the research, Football United developed the following hypothesis that the results can be assessed against:

Football United believe that participants in the Football United program will have significantly better health, social, education, and employment outcomes than those who do not participate at all or who only participate minimally in the program. On a wider scale, Football United believe that sports-based intervention programs can address issues of disaffection amongst young refugees, build bridges between communities, and contribute toward promoting social cohesion.

Further details:

Supported under the Australian Research Council Linkage Projects funding scheme (LP0989930).

Partners: Blacktown District Soccer Football Association, Community Relations Commission, Evans Intensive English Centre, Football United, Liverpool Migrant Resource Centre, Miller Intensive English Centre, Sydney Football Club, Sydney South West Area Health Service, SydWest Multicultural Services, Transcultural Mental Health Centre.

Sally Nathan, Anne Bunde-Birouste, Clifton Evers, Lynn Kemp, Julie MacKenzie and Robert Henley, Social cohesion through football: a quasi-experimental mixed methods design to evaluate a complex health promotion program, BMC Public Health 2010, 10:587doi:10.1186/1471-2458-10-587 Published: 5 October 2010, http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/10/587