Features > Playing away from home...
Playing away from home...
It's a wintry day in the East End of Glasgow. A freezing drizzle is falling on the grim parades of decaying shops and scruffy bookmakers. Within the shadow of Celtic FC's mighty Parkhead terraces, a dozen or more football players are having a kick about on a municipal soccer pitch.
This could be a depressing image. Yet this apparently desultory game actually represents a triumph: because all the players on the pitch were once homeless.
David Duke is 27. "A few years ago, my life just fell apart. First, my dad died. Then I lost my job and my girlfriend. So I started on these drinking binges — I ended up blacking out, losing weekends. And it spiralled from there."
David's particular problem was his pride. "I was... too embarrassed to go to relations for help. I kipped on floors and sofas."
He points down the road. "Just along there is the hostel I first went to when I'd had enough of bus stations... They call [it] Nightmare on Bell Street. It was terrible, smelly and dirty. There were junkies outside dealing smack. I just put my head down every night, and tried to ignore the screams."
After a few weeks, David landed a place in a residential scheme for homeless people under 25. "I was putting my life back together. And then one day I saw an ad in The Big Issue for homeless football." He smiles at the memory. "I remembered how I used to play for Celtic Boys. I was good! Then one of the staff at the scheme told me that if I made it through the trials, I could travel to Sweden for a tournament, the Homeless World Cup. That was the clincher."
Mel Young is the organiser of the Homeless World Cup. "I'm 51. I started life in community publishing. I worked on the Wester Hailes Sentinel, a newspaper for a pretty deprived housing estate in Edinburgh. By the 1990s I was very angry about the appalling numbers of homeless people in Edinburgh and Glasgow. Then one day in '93 I saw people selling The Big Issue in London. By Christmas that year we were selling 140,000 copies of Scotland's very own version."
In 2001, Young attended a "World Conference of Street Papers". One evening, Young found himself downing some cold Pilsners with Harald Schmied, who runs the Graz street paper. Discussing ways to unite homeless people from across the world, they hit on football: the sport without frontiers.
Two years later, the first Homeless World Cup was held in Graz. Teams from 18 countries took part. UEFA stumped up £30,000 to help things along, and the event was a slam-dunk success.
Buy does the Homeless World Cup really "change lives"? Post-event research, done six months after the Edinburgh tournament, showed that, of 217 homeless competitors, 38% were in regular employment, 40% had improved their housing situation, and only 18% were still selling street papers. And a whopping 94% declared that they had "a new motivation for life".
David Duke tells the rest of his tale: "After I started playing football again, everything else fell into place. I began to enjoy life... And, yes, in the end I made it to Sweden."
As he turns and jogs away to the locker room, the drizzle is still falling. But somehow it seems a little less irritating, and the cold just a little more bearable.
