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41 40 FOOTBALL FORGOODMAGAZINE | AUGUST 2019 KICKSTARTERS also cautious. Incessantly, they would ask him: “How long will the football school be around for?” Florian was puzzled. “We are here to stay,” he responded, “The football school is a permanent fixture.” He later discovered what prompted this questioning. “What I didn’t realise at the time was that that was typical here. Such initiatives popped up all the time, only to disappear a few months later. What these young people lacked was consistency.” By running his programme every single day and by exceeding the lifespan of other projects, Florian proved to both the young players and the wider community that he was committed. Florian’s advantage was also his visibility. The pitch he used for training sessions was situated in the very centre of Tarrafal and Florian soon became a prominent figure within the town. The fact that Florian arrived on the pitch day after day to support their children and stand up for their rights to structured training sessions won him the favours of the community. Up until then, the sport had mainly been played seriously by adults. “I knew that the kids enjoyed playing football and I wanted to offer them a time and place to do so, too,” Florian says. “That’s all that was on my mind. At that stage, I still had no idea of what football for good was; that it even existed as a concept.” Though he may not have been aware that football could be used for social change, through his work he was inadvertently doing just that. The football sessions were not only a source of enjoyment for the young players and trained them to become better footballers, they also gave them a support system, a form of structure in their daily lives during which they were often left to their own devices. “Many of the children live below the poverty line. None of them are homeless, as they always have some family member to live with, but they are, in effect, ‘street kids by day’. Some of the families want to help them, but don’t know how or have the means. Other kids come from very abusive backgrounds.” Compounding this, Florian explains, is a sense of fatefulness and resignation rooted in religion. “I want to make He then phoned as many Austrian football clubs he could find in the yellow pages, asking them if they would support the initiative and donate foot- balls and kit. Austrian Bundesliga club FK Austria Wien agreed. Just before Florian and Marisa left Austria, the pair registered Delta Cultura as a ‘Verein’, an association, making the organisation official, if only on paper. On the day of their departure, Florian and Marisa went to collect the dona- tion from FK Austria Wien. Though he found that they had kindly set aside kit, Florian could not hide his disap- pointment when he investigated the package further and discovered: “There are no footballs! It’s only kit!” Florian quickly dialled the numbers of all of his friends who were remotely interested in the sport. His friend and today’s President of Delta Cultura Austria, Liz Zimmermann, sprang to action. Six footballs were added to the container of their belongings to be shipped to Cape Verde. Upon their arrival on Cape Verde, Florian and Marisa began running a bar and a restaurant to earn a living. Far more interesting to Florian, how- ever, was the football project. When the shipping container arrived one month later, he strolled down to the public pitch in the centre of Tarrafal and drew a sign. ‘Sign up for new football school! First meeting will be on 2 nd December in the old cinema’, it read in bold letters. On the arranged date, Florian arrived at Tarrafal’s old cinema with six footballs and a box brimming with FK Austria Wien kit, unsure of what to expect. The creaking building was still empty, but he didn’t have to wait long. Moments later, a steady stream of children and teenagers began filing in. In just a few hours, over one hundred children and teenagers had signed up. “I really didn’t expect that many to turn up!” Florian says, recall- ing his astonishment. “At the time, it was only Marisa’s broth- er and I doing it,” Florian says. The pair divided the age categories up between themselves and began training. “In the beginning, we got up at six in the morning to train with the children and also did sessions with children later in the morning and in the afternoon.” While the young players trained with energy and enthusiasm, they were