How the Diversity Football League is bringing Oxford’s communities together... on and off the pitch
EVEN before the fog of lockdown had lifted, Hassan Sabrie’s phone would not stop pinging. ‘We said, “When everything is OK, we can go back and play football”,’ he explains. ‘But now they’re eager, they can’t wait. Every single day my phone keeps getting texts, “When are we starting?”’
It won’t be until the new year that Sabrie can unlock the gates and the ball begins rolling once more. Teams in this corner of Oxford suffered a particularly severe case of second-season syndrome. Around them, coronavirus will kill off many community clubs. But Sabrie and Co are just getting started.
In 2018, they set up the Diversity Football League, an awardwinning venture for players struggling to find their position.
‘ We have Afghan players, Kurdish, Pakistani, Indian, Syrian, Nigerian, Jamaican, West Indian, Romanian, Polish,’ he explains. Refugees and locals too. ‘One team can have nine or 10 different languages,’ he adds.
Conservative estimates put the number of tongues across the league at 25 or 26. But Sabrie insists: ‘We don’t just want to be seen that we’re here for language-counting.’
They’re not only here for football, either. After their second season was cut short by Covid, Diversity Football League turned inwards, towards their own. By the start of this month they were distributing up to three tonnes of food a week to 400 struggling families around the community.
‘I know it’s a bit of a cliche and it’s said a lot,’ says Michael Thurlow of the Oxfordshire FA. ‘But it is a perfect example of using football to have a wider impact. We’re really proud of them making such a difference in Oxford.’
In August, Diversity Football League was named the FA’s National Grassroots Project of the Year. Sabrie and Co weren’t even aware they had been nominated until former England striker Emile Heskey turned up. ‘Their reactions were priceless,’ says Thurlow.
What began as an annual tournament has snowballed into a community beacon. Next month the league will begin their third campaign. For the first time, teams will play 11-a- side rather than nine on nine. Mujahid Hamidi, Sabrie’s co- director, explains: ‘A lot of community leaders were asking for something more because players didn’t want to join other leagues. They thought they weren’t representative of them.’
It’s a problem Sabrie had seen during 11 years working in grassroots football. ‘What I noticed was a lot of black, minority and Asian people were not in the football scene in this city,’ he says.
Among the issues he diagnosed? Often passion was being translated as aggression. And they weren’t getting the support they needed. ‘They are dropped to sub and in this weather,’ he says, eventually players ‘drop themselves’ and never come back. During a tournament in September, these two worlds collided.
‘I had 12 teams and four came from the mainstream leagues. They’d never played with us — all white, English,’ says Sabrie. ‘When I invited them... the question was asked, “How will they fit in with what we’re doing?”’
By the end, the local teams had committed to return next year and beyond. ‘We realised this is bigger than us because we are finding people who have been dropped by academies or the big clubs coming to Diversity Football League at age 19 because they want to continue playing,’ he adds. ‘That’s why I jumped to say: we have talent. We can invite scouts and if you’re talented you can go to another level.’
For a time, he wondered where his own kids would end up when their youth careers ended.
‘I know everything that’s going on with football in the city and I thought, “Diversity Football League is going to shine and bring those who cannot shine in other places”,’ he says. ‘It fills a gap that is not being seen in the city.’
The Oxfordshire FA had noticed this drop- off but finding a solution was more difficult.
‘There was other work going on but they’d just engage the one community’, explains Thurlow.
‘What Hassan and the guys have done so well is engaging so many different communities and bringing them all together.’
On and off the pitch. For the past eight months members of Diversity Football League have helped communities who struggled even before Covid struck.
‘Lockdown actually uncovered a lot of social and economic problems,’ says Hamidi.
So they set up a no-questionsasked food service. The first week saw them distributing to 40 families. Now it’s around 400. ‘We saw that a lot of community members wouldn’t ask for help from the council or the authorities. There’s a lot of shame involved,’ continues Hamidi. ‘They don’t want a council van coming to their house and handing them food in case their neighbour sees.’
Diversity Football League worked with food banks and struck a deal with a local charity, SOFEA. ‘They made it a lot cheaper for us,’ says Hamidi. ‘We have two and a half, sometimes even three tonnes of food every single week.’
To ensure the service remained sustainable — and volunteers weren’t out of pocket — they asked for £1 in exchange for £25 to £30 worth of food. ‘Without Diversity Football League, we wouldn’t have this,’ says Sabrie. ‘ The majority of volunteers are people who are playing the games — some of the families we’d never even met.’
When football returns, they hope to keep spreading their web there, too. ‘We already have a link in London — we made a league called Somali British Champions League,’ says Sabrie. It features teams from Leicester, Cardiff and eight from the capital.
‘The winner of that league and the winner of Diversity Football League do something called the Super Cup. One year they come to Oxford, one year we go to London. Last year we beat them.
‘We want to continue doing good outside football because, for me, integration is more important.
‘I wanted to become a professional and then it didn’t happen. With Diversity Football League we want those success stories, we want one of our children maybe playing with Reading one day. But that platform is bigger than just football, we want to bring all communities together.’