KISS project helps unite football family

UEFA often talks about the football family. But 53 member associations cover immense geographical dimensions and a rich weave of know-how. As the parent body, UEFA must bring the family together and this is best done by networking, by sharing knowledge, by developing a collective intelligence, and ultimately by collecting the various know-how to create best practices.

Knowledge & Information Sharing
Hence UEFA's decision, in 2006, to establish a Knowledge & Information Sharing Scenario, known by its family-orientated initials of KISS. The definition of the KISS project is beautifully simple: it is about bringing together knowledge and people.

Operations, governance, development
KISS spans three broad fields: football operations, football governance and football development. A pool of experts in each field has been assembled, recruited mainly from national associations which have set benchmarks in a particular area.

Online exchanges
The project started with a series of seminars, which were then followed up with workshops where issues received in-depth treatment. To extend the family spirit beyond the get-togethers, all sessions are filmed and made available online via a dedicated web platform, on which members, with personalised access, can communicate and share ideas, experience and documentation. This is now available to a wider audience, with coaches, referees and those responsible for club licensing participating in the online interchanges.

Workshops
But online networking is more effective when face-to-face contact has already been made. Workshops have already taken place in venues as far apart as Helsinki, Yerevan and Skopje, and have addressed issues such as corporate management, sponsoring, media rights, project management and communication, along with seminars dedicated to legal and marketing matters.

Working communities
The project was taken a stage further when 27 of UEFA's member associations met in Israel in February 2008 to identify key issues and to undertake collective action in response to them. As a result, associations facing similar challenges or preoccupations have been grouped into various working communities. Communities are groups of national associations' members who work on specific projects and create good practices by elaborating solutions to their problems.

Ongoing evolution
If KISS is about establishing good practices, then it will be taken a step further, and links with research worked out together with universities on crucial matters such as ethics in football for instance. This is a way to make the football world evolve. But it also gives members of national associations the opportunity to learn and acquire diplomas.

Education – and cultural change
Ultimately, the goal of the project is to help national associations' members to be empowered, to become autonomous, and to network regularly with other associations to further develop the good practices. In this way KISS is not just about education – it also triggers a cultural change. Eventually, this process of accessing and sharing knowledge will be made available to the wider football family including the open public.

Click here to read more about KISS.