Football First  was a football-led education intervention developed in Chennai, India, to help reconnect children from low-income communities with school. We worked as part of a team with professional coaches and physiotherapists from Portsmouth FC, alongside a local education provider determined to reach children who had stopped attending.

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Before the school day began, at around 7am, children gathered for professional football coaching, followed by breakfast and then school. Hundreds attended. Football created a shared routine, a sense of belonging and an immediate reason to turn up—transforming morning attendance and wider engagement with education.

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The project was rooted in a recognition that non-attendance is rarely simply a lack of motivation. For families facing poverty, insecure work, long journeys, inadequate services and other daily pressures, school can become difficult to sustain. In Chennai, inequalities are especially visible in low-income settlements and resettlement areas such as Kannagi Nagar, Ezhil Nagar and Perumbakkam. In Kannagi Nagar, one study found only 2,000 school places for around 20,000 school-age children; 42% of children were travelling more than 20km to attend school elsewhere, while around 35% of 15–18-year-olds had dropped out.  

 

A more recent city-wide effort identified 7,302 children out of school in Chennai in 2026, underlining the continuing scale of the challenge.

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Football First did not treat football as a reward for education. It treated football as a pathway into it: an accessible, joyful form of participation that can build trust, strengthen peer relationships and make the school day feel possible. The project demonstrated how a shift in the first touch point of a school day can change a child’s relationship with learning—and with their future.