Tami Hay from the Peres Center for Peace talks about the benefits of using football3, the reaction she received from the youth and coaches involved and why she will continue to use the game in the future. You can view the YouTube clip or read the transcript below.
What are the major benefits of using football3?
Football3 takes football and makes it not just a simple game; it also makes it an educational tool. For the programmes that we are running, working in a conflict area, football3 helps us to create another tool to make this dialogue happen.
Yes, this is what we’ve been doing for the last eight years, using football as a tool to bring Israelis and Palestinian kids together, but after eight years, if you want to get more into depth with the process with the kids then you need to have this additional element that really takes the values of the football game and the value of fair play and combines it with the situation of conflict. I think you can benefit a lot from that.
How do you use football3 in your programmes?
Because it’s in mixed teams—Palestinians and Israelis are not playing against each other, but they’re playing together, in mixed teams—one of the things we are focusing on is to create identity for the team. One of the things we decided to add, and this was the idea of one of my project managers: she said, ‘OK. What if, for example, in the beginning, in the first session, the first part of football three, we will give them possible names of animals, countries, etc. It will be like a lottery. They will need to choose one kid from each team, one Palestinian, one Israeli. They will need to pick a note with a name and this is the identity of the team. This name will be followed in all the other football3 activities until the end of the year. So then they develop an identity, a common, one identity for their teams.’ It helps them, because then it makes it more fun and more colourful.
How did coaches and participants react to the football3 methodology?
Well, the kids that participated already and experienced that in South Africa and other tournaments, they came back with a really positive experience and a positive approach towards that. But with the other kids who had never experienced it before, it looked to them at the beginning like too much talking, heavy, like school. So they were afraid that they would not have enough time to play, that it would be more talking than playing, that it wouldn’t be fun. But the main reason for that is really that it takes time because of the two languages and the translation. So, after we did those adjustments and after the experience in the first activity, in the second and third one, it goes much faster. So it’s just a matter of getting used to it.
On the coaches’ level, they were quite interested because for them it was refreshing the method that they’re working according to. Some of them, not all of them, started to work with that and do it also in their local communities, in their local training, and not only in the joint activities with Israelis and Palestinians.
What is the added value of football3 in your programmes?
The Israeli and the Palestinian kids, on a daily basis, they don’t have any interaction, they don’t have any access to the other side apart from projects like what we do, like the Twinned Peace Sports School Programme.
So you bring on a monthly basis hundreds of kids who meet, play in mixed teams. They have the language of football, they have the language of other sports that they do, but the football3 element helps us to make this interaction, and this is what we are trying to create. It’s not just, ‘OK, you saw a Palestinian or you saw an Israeli kid once in your life, OK, fine’. This is really a process. This football3 element is based on a process. It’s not just a one-time show. The kids need to get used to the rationale of that and then it will become the language that they, by themselves, use. This is, I think, why it’s so powerful.
