News
Partner meeting in Bern
December 2024
The Pinball team gathered in Bern, Switzerland, for the final transnational meeting of 2024 at the beginning of December. The meeting agenda centered on the launch of the online tool and course for football coaches, which represent the project’s final components. Both the tool and course are set to be released in early spring—stay tuned for updates on the website.
The project will conclude with a final conference in Helsinki, Finland, in April 2025. Participants are welcome to join either in person or online; more details will be shared soon.
Multiplier event
May 2024
Exceptional PINBALL Multiplier event – Italy UNIMORE-FORMODENA in collaboration with AC Reggiana 1919 – LA SCUOLA SI FA INSIEME: LA SQUADRA DEL LEVI! – 29th Aprile 2024
Within the PINBALL framework, UNIMORE and ForModena organized an event on the fight against bullying and social disadvantage, in collaboration with professional (AC Reggiana 1919) and non-professional (Terre di Castello) sports associations, a high-school (Istituto Levi), local institutions (Vignola Municipality and local police) and associations (Aliante Cooperativa Sociale). The event was meant to use the magic of football to unite people against bullying and all forms of discrimination.
In the first part of the morning, all school students (approximately, 1,400 students) took part in lab activities, where they had to produce an artistic work with their anti-bullying and discrimination message. After institutional speeches, a street tournament for over 100 players was organized and attended by all school students. Mixed teams were formed, including school students, local police, grassroots players from Reggiana, and players from Terre di Castello.
Signatures were collected among 768 participants, although the event was attended to by approximately double the number of participants (approximately 1,500).
The event received strong media attention, including an article in a local newspaper, interviews for regional radios, and for national (RAI) and regional (TRC) televisions.
Participating Institutions:
- Sport associations: Ac Reggiana 1919, Terre di Castello
- NGOs: Aliante Cooperativa Sociale
- Vignola Municipality
- Marano Municipality
- Castelfranco Municipality
- Local Police (Vignola)
- Cooperativa Sociale Dolce
The Pinball Challenge 2024
Do you accept the Pinball challenge?
This fun challenge will strengthen the team spirit, give you as a coach an opportunity to promote a safe social climate and at the same time help to inspire the whole football community to follow your league. On top of all that, you will also have the chance to win amazing prizes! 
What is this challenge? Every once in a while, an activity of the PINBALL Methodology will be proposed on our Facebook page and you will be challenged to implement the activity within your team and post a picture or a video about it, with our hashtags. This challenge is not only for football clubs: teachers can participate too with their classroom!
REMEMBER: The PINBALL challenge is a long-term game: the more activities you participate in, the more possibilities you have to win!
The FAs partners of the project:
- FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION OF FINLAND [Suomen Palloliitto]
- CROATIAN FOOTBALL FEDERATION [Hrvatski Nogometni Savez]
- HELLENIC FOOTBALL FEDERATION [Ελληνική Ποδοσφαιρική Ομοσπονδία]
- PORTUGUESE FOOTBALL FEDERATION [Federação Portuguesa de Futebol]
- SWISS FOOTBALL ASSOCIATION [Schweizerischer Fussballverband // Association Suisse de Football // Associazione Svizzera di Calcio]
Click on the button with your flag to find the Pinball activities, instructions to the challenge and the prizes you can win for your team, club or school.
Activities for children 10-14 years old:
Activities for children 15-18 years old:
News update December 2023
2023 22 December
The Pinball team has been busy working on the project since the last update. Not only did we finish the projects methodology (it can be found to read here), we also had several digital “train the trainers”-sessions with football coaches from Finland, Portugal and Greece in October. After the trainings, the coaches were ready to share their new knowledge and help us pilot the methodology and activities within football clubs in their countries. Altogether, the activities for 10–14-year-old players have been tested in more than 20 clubs and 40 teams in these three countries with good feedback so far. The next step is to collect all the input, make adjustments in the material and then move on to the next pilot phase which will be in Switzerland and Croatia.
Pictures from the Finish football club “Kauklahden Pyrintö” trying the activities during a training.
Next year will be very fun and exciting within the Pinball Project – be sure to follow us on Facebook to have the latest updates from our activities!
The Pinball team wishes you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New 2024!s
News update July 2023
2023 4 July
As you might already know, the Pinball project is an Erasmus+ project in collaboration between the national football federations of Finland, Croatia, Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, as well as Unimore, ForModena, Friends and the UEFA foundation for children. The three-year long project started in July 2022 and intends to prevent bullying within children’s and adolescents’ football teams.
The project team had a meeting in Athens 5-6th of April, where we mainly focused on the methodology development and training for trainers. The result of the teams’ efforts during this spring is a comprehensive document that describes the methodology and exercises that football coaches can implement in their existing trainings. You will find the document here: https://pinballproject.eu/uploads/2023/06/PinBall-Methodology.pdf
We also had an online session to pilot the material with coaches from the Finnish FA, to gain their important feedback on the material.
The Pinball team has also produced a video with national football players from all partner countries that takes a stand against bullying, be sure to watch it on our Facebook Page .
In the end of June, we published a quiz on Facebook where the participants could win tickets to national football games in Sweden, Greece, Portugal, Finland, Switerland and Croatia. The winners will be randomly selected and presented on the Facebook page on July 15th, so do not forget to check the page to see if you have won the tickets!
https://www.facebook.com/PinballProject
Last but not least, we would like to take the opportunity to wish you all a great summer.
See you on the Football pitch!
Meeting in Athens
2023 5-6 April
The project had its second transnational partner meeting in sunny Athens 5-6th of April. Representatives from each partner team gathered to discuss the methodology in depth before developing material to be tested and evaluated by coaches. The team also planned for some very exciting activities and campaigns to be released in the near future, so be sure to follow us on Facebook to make sure you do not miss out: https://www.facebook.com/PinballProject
News update Pinball december 2022
2022 21 December
The Pinball project is an Erasmus+ project in collaboration between the national football
federations of Finland, Croatia, Greece, Portugal and Switzerland, as well as Unimore, ForModena, Friends and the UEFA foundation for children. The three-year long project started in July this year and intends to prevent bullying within children’s and adolescents’ football teams.
During the first phase of the project, we started by mapping the partner countries existing activities and projects to promote a positive social climate within sports and football. The next step was to ask children and coaches in football teams from Finland, Croatia, Greece, Portugal and Switzerland about their experience of bullying. The analysis shows that a huge number of youth football players encountered bullying at least sometimes in their lives, either on the football field or outside of it. Specifically, according to 50% of the coaches, at least some of their players were victims of bullying within the football context.
Bullying is a relevant social issue in all of Europe, and it is widespread in many educational
environments. Based on our survey, it is clear that the football context is not immune to this
scourge, but it also emerges that football itself can be a ground for developing positive
values to combat bullying. The next step in the project will be to start designing a method
that will be piloted and eventually implemented in the partner countries existing structures.
Multiplier event
2022 29 September
PINBALL’s first multiplier event took place in Reggio Emilia (Italy), thanks to the partnership among the University of Reggio Emilia, the police headquarters and the Italian Football Club “AC Reggiana”
Kick off meeting
2022 5-7 July
The project had a kick off meeting in July 2022, at the Croatian football federations’ office in Zagreb. During the project period, in addition to continuous digital project meetings, there will be four transnational meetings as well as several ‘training the trainers’ course activities, one national tournament of each participating federation, one final international tournament and one final project conference in Helsinki.
