Fair Play

Many sports today are as lucrative as they are high-octane. And, increasingly, star players are giving back, with philanthropic initiatives to help those less fortunate follow in their footsteps.

Words by PAUL KENDALL

More and more, sports stars are finding themselves near the top of the annual rich lists, jostling alongside entrepreneurs, actors and oligarchs. The best command six-figure sums not just in prize money, but from lucrative endorsements ranging from clothing to technology.

But far from sitting on their fortunes, these sports stars are working for and donating to charity. “A lot of athletes are doing a lot of work in this field,” confirms Gary Stannett, the chief executive of Active Communities Network, a sports-based charity that works with young people from deprived backgrounds. “They either give their time to established charities like the Prince’s Trust [the Prince of Wales’ youth charity] or they set up their own foundation.”

In fact, in the past 12 months three UK Premiership players – Manchester United’s Michael Carrick, Watford’s Troy Deeney and Leicester City’s Jamie Vardy – have all set up organizations dedicated, in different ways, to creating opportunities for people who are less fortunate than them.

In the case of Vardy, the striker who was at the heart of Leicester City’s fairy-tale season last year when the 5000-1 outsiders won the Premier League, it is an academy to give non-league players a chance to break into the professional game. Deeney’s foundation aims to raise money for children with learning disabilities, while Carrick’s looks to help children in deprived communities in Manchester and Newcastle in the UK.

Another footballing hero, Ronaldinho, who won the World Cup with Brazil in 2002 and twice won La Liga with Barcelona, has set up a chain of soccer academies, from Japan to the UAE, and is opening a new academy in Baku early next year, which aims to encourage more children in Azerbaijan to play football and pursue a healthy lifestyle.

Rafael Nadal’s foundation builds schools and tennis centres for children, such as this one in India

Outside of football, England rugby hero Jonny Wilkinson has founded an organization to help people with mental health problems, and tennis legend Rafael Nadal has opened an academy in his home town of Manacor in Majorca, Spain.

All of these projects are a far cry from the popular image of sports stars as selfish multimillionaires, who split their time between the playing field, the casino and the Aston Martin showroom. What has changed? Perhaps the best advocate for sports philanthropy is John Amaechi. A former basketball star, and the first ever Briton to make a starting line-up in the NBA, Amaechi began mentoring troubled children while still at college in the US. He currently works for three charities: Greenhouse Sports, a Londonbased sports charity; the English Federation of Disability Sport; and the NSPCC.

“Sometimes you have to boil what you do for a living down to its core components,” says Amaechi. “I put a ball through a hole for a living. It was so eminently dumb, it was so unworthy of hubris, that the only way I could imbue my career with anything real was by using my privileged position to do some good.”

His philanthropy, he says, gave him far more satisfaction than his basketball career (for which he was inducted into the US Basketball Hall of Fame). “There is no comparison,” he says. “It is a bloody amazing experience. If, at the end of a career of 20 years, if you’re lucky, or five years for most, all you can say is that you kicked a ball real good, then you screwed up. You missed out on the whole point of being that powerful. You squandered an opportunity. Everybody should do it. Not for any higher purpose or to secure a place in heaven, but because they should. It is what people of good conscience, and who have great privilege, do.”

Amaechi’s fervour makes the spine tingle and the effect he has on those who participate in his projects is legendary. As well as counselling young people while in America, he adopted two teenagers from troubled homes (now grown men), and went on to qualify as an organizational psychologist. Today, he advises FTSE 250 companies on major transformation projects and initiatives to improve the productivity of their workforce.

But his achievements are even more astonishing when you know his background. Born in Boston to a Nigerian father and a Mancunian mother, Amaechi was brought to Britain aged four when his mother fled his abusive and controlling father. She arrived in Stockport with just US$2,000 and had to rebuild her life – and that of her three children – from scratch.

The young Amaechi showed little interest in sport – preferring books – and grew into a tall and rather overweight adolescent. Things changed when he was spotted by a scout in Manchester city centre, and he set his sights on playing in the NBA. Despite having never picked up a basketball before, he decided to move to a US college, where he could pursue both his education and his basketball simultaneously. In 1995, after several setbacks, he achieved his goal, signing for the Cleveland Cavaliers.

But Amaechi is the sort of person who is always looking for the next challenge. “When I was in the NBA, I suddenly realized that every day, driving to practice, I went past this school and as I got better and became a featured player on the team, kids would wave and notice. And I said to myself, ‘I drive past this place anyway, what harm would it do to stop in for an hour once a month?’ Not to do a big thing, just to walk into one classroom and say, ‘Your teacher says you’ve been doing really well, so how about we talk for a little bit?’ And so that’s what I started doing. It was that easy.”

John Amaechi

Rio Ferdinand

Amaechi believes far more sports stars should combine their professional obligations with philanthropic work. So why don’t they? “Even if someone is willing to help, they are often baffled as to how they should help,” Amaechi explains. “They are inundated with requests to do stuff and find the barrage difficult to manage. They often have little or no support managing it, nobody to say, ‘This would be a good way to start you off, this would be a good thing to do first’. Nobody helps them with that.

“Also, many athletes have people around them who are controlling what they can and can’t do,” he adds. “Their teams will literally control what they should and shouldn’t do philanthropically. They also have agents and managers and all kinds of people around them who tell them what they think would be advantageous for them to do – with a view to creating the most marketable person. “There are some athletes out there who are entirely disinterested because, right now, for the next five or 10 years, they’re focusing on their feet or hands.

“But there are a large proportion of athletes who are engaged, who want to speak out about a social issue, but know that if they do speak out they risk controversy. And their sponsor will tell them, ‘Well, this wasn’t really part of the deal’. Sponsors want someone who is as blank a sheet of paper as possible, so they can plaster their logo all over them.”

Rio Ferdinand Foundation helps young people from deprived backgrounds

Michael Carrick meets fans at the Manchester United Foundation Dream Day

Ronaldinho with young footballers in Baku, where he will open a soccer academy

Jamie Vardy

Michael Carrick

Jonny Wilkinson

Troy Deeney

One star who has always managed to combine his elite career with causes close to his heart is former England football captain Rio Ferdinand. Brought up by a single mother on one of Britain’s toughest council estates, Ferdinand has worked with young people from deprived backgrounds ever since signing for West Ham at the age of 17. Now retired, he devotes much of his time to his Rio Ferdinand Foundation, a charity that uses sport to introduce young people to a range of traineeships and pathways to employment.

More than 5,000 people have taken part in the programme and many of them have gone on to great things. Gary Stannett, an adviser on Ferdinand’s board, talks about one young man from a violent, crime-ridden estate in London, whose life was spiralling out of control. One of his friends had been shot and killed, other friends were in prison. But, thanks to his passion for football, he started attending the foundation’s activities and, although he was never good enough to become a professional footballer, developed leadership and communication skills, became a qualified youth worker, and eventually took a degree in sports science. He is now working as a project co-ordinator at Celtic FC Foundation in Glasgow.

There is no comparison. Philanthropy is amazing, If, at the end of a career of 20 years – if you're lucky – or five years for most, all you can say is that you kicked a ball real good, then you screwed up. You missed out on the whole point of being that powerful you squandered an opportunity.

“He has recognized that he is a leader,” says Stannett. “If a young person develops a sense of self-worth, if they realize that they can achieve, if they have a vision and an ambition to work towards, then they feel a lot stronger in themselves and have a much more positive impact on other people.”

Not all sports foundations are as successful as Ferdinand’s. Many, launched amid great fanfare, fold a few years down the line after running out of money or failing to deliver on their promises. “The ones that last more than four or five years, you can count on the fingers of one hand,” says Stannett. “Sometimes the problem is with the player, who is not always clear what his or her mission is. Or they receive bad advice or make bad appointments. Or they don’t focus enough on long-term sustainability. If you are looking to deliver programmes, it can’t just be the footballer’s money because that’s going to run out,” he adds. Indeed, Ferdinand has pumped his own money into his foundation, but the organization has a ‘mixed economy’ and raises its own money via fundraising events, grants and corporate sponsorship.

“If an athlete is particularly passionate about something,” Stannett continues, “and they feel like they want to drive that agenda, shape the way the world is, then they should do it, but they need to have a very, very clear vision. They need to have the right people around it and they need to think about longterm sustainability. If you haven’t got that then you run the risk of it being seen, rightly or wrongly, as an ego project. Even worse, you run a project and then, when the money runs out, you let down the very people you’re meant to be helping.”