The Football Families Project: Learning from Practice

The Football Families Project is a community-based systemic psychotherapy model that uses football as a culturally meaningful and emotionally engaging route into therapeutic work with young people aged 12 to 18 and their families. Developed through four years of grassroots practice, the project responds to a pressing challenge across services: many young people live with distress, exclusion, relational strain, or emotional difficulties yet struggle to access timely support through conventional pathways.

Delivered in schools, youth organisations, and community football settings, the project invites young people to come as they are. They do not need prior therapy language, diagnostic labels, or readiness for clinic-based intervention. Instead, they enter through a familiar activity that holds identity, belonging, aspiration, friendship, competition, and resilience.

The model combines three strands:

• Systemic Group psychotherapy

• Goal-focused personal development

• Embodied and relational learning through football/Sport based activities

Across sessions, participants explore values, identity, emotional regulation, communication, family relationships, and hopes for the future. Using narrative and systemic practices, young people create personalised “Future Cards” to represent strengths and preferred identities, alongside a “Team of Life” exercise that maps relationships, supporters, resources, and networks of care.

The programme concludes with a witnessing event where parents, carers, siblings, and important others hear young people speak about their learning and growth. These moments often generate pride, repair, and renewed connection across family systems.

This workshop will share the theory, practice, and lived learning that shaped the Football Families Project. It will invite participants to reflect on how systemic psychotherapy can move beyond clinic walls into community spaces where people already gather and make meaning. Attendees will experience adapted exercises from the programme and consider how lived experience, values and virtues shape their own journeys as therapist. 

The presentation will be relevant to clinicians, supervisors, trainers, researchers, educators, and community practitioners seeking clinically grounded and socially responsive systemic practice and will leave with a therapeutic tool that can be replicated and used in their own working context.