Project details
Simply Football
Bayer 04’s football team is part of the “Einfach Fußball” Project (Simply Football), which is a program run by the Bayer AG and the sporting management of Bayer 04 Leverkusen to support children and teenagers with disabilities in football and social skills. Against the background of their social responsibility, the Bayer AG and Bayer 04 Leverkusen GmbH are engaged in the advancement of pupils in schools for special needs, with focus on intellectual disabilities since 2010.
Bayer created partnerships between special schools and mainstream soccer clubs of the German Soccer Federation (DFB) which should have a lasting contribution to include disabled teenagers into the cultural aspects of football clubs and especially the participation into active club life and the inclusion to society. Currently there are 22 participating Football clubs in Germany.
The first step was building up connections between German football clubs and schools for children with special needs (intellectual disabilities).
A feature of this program is the support by co-coaches who assist the head coach while training. There are 2-3 assistants per training session, i.e., young able-bodied players from regular club teams instead of commonly used adult assistant coaches. The underlying reason for that is the peer teaching concept which aims to foster the social and football skills of the disabled teenagers. The organization of the training sessions is optimized with that peer teaching and some children with disabilities get the opportunity to experience a role- change from a player’s perspective to a coaching perspective with this peer-teaching concept as well.
Bayer 04 goes to School
Bayer 04 Wheelchair Users
