FC Barcelona Launches Football Schools in Several Kurdish Cities

Welat TV - Erbil

FC Barcelona has launched the League of Hope project, which aims to use sport as a tool to build peace in war-affected areas by establishing community football schools in the Kurdistan Region and the Kurdish areas of Syria.

According to the club’s official website, the project’s main objective is to “promote social cohesion and prevent future violent conflicts and radicalization processes among new generations, with special attention to the sons and daughters of ISIS victims”.

The project also focuses on “empowering children and adolescents, especially girls and those from marginalized communities, such as displaced people, refugees, rural populations, and ethnic minorities,” according to the club’s official statement.

According to the club, the schools will be set up in six cities: Kobani, Hasaka, Tirbaspiye, Raqqa in Syria, and Erbil and Sulaymaniyah in the Kurdistan Region.

The club announced that former FC Barcelona player Oleguer Presas had led a joint mission to Syria and Iraq in April 2025, conducting several training sessions for future coaching teams at community football schools.

The Catalan player visited Kurdish areas of Syria, including the city of Kobani, on April 25. The project will start on 25 June 2025 and run until October 2026. It will directly involve more than 600 children and young people between the ages of 8 and 14, with criteria that ensure gender equality and ethnic diversity and the inclusion of refugees and rural residents.

The club emphasized that the project “aims to become a seed and a testing ground for a sports model that places community values and social strength at its core,” with the potential to “adapt the community football model to local contexts and needs, making it a replicable methodology for other parts of the world.”

The project is being implemented in cooperation with several international organizations and is funded by the Catalan Agency for Development Cooperation.