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The 2008 Homeless World Cup in Melbourne

The 2008 tournament will be held in Melbourne, Australia, December 1st to 7th, at two parks: Federation Square and Birrarung Marr. It will have a new record of participating projects. National Teams from 56 nations will gather in Melbourne, amongst them for the first time 8 all female teams competing in the Women’s Cup. Two Greek Australians will participate in the tournament but in different teams. George Chalkias is the coach of the Australian team and Christos Alefantes is the creator and one of the player for the Greek Homeless team.

The Homeless World Cup is an international football (soccer) tournament, where teams made up entirely of homeless people compete. The event is held annually and, as of 2008, is in its sixth year.

The tournament was created at the end of the 2001 International Network of Street Papers Conference in Cape Town that Mel Young, Co-founder The Big Issue Scotland, and Harald Schmied, editor of Megaphon, a street paper in Austria, came up with the idea for the Homeless World Cup. They decided to make it happen and 18 months later the first tournament took place in Graz, Austria. It was such a success that they decided to do more.

Player Eligibility

Players must:

  • Be male or female and at least 16 years of age at the time of the tournament
  • Have been homeless at some point after the previous year’s World Cup OR
  • Make their main living income as a streetpaper vendor OR
  • Be asylum seekers (who have neither positive asylum status nor working permit)

Anyone can participate regardless of his or her ability.

Participants

A maximum of 4 players per team on the court:

  • 3 outfield players,
  • 1 goalkeeper,
  • Plus 4 substitution players (rolling substitution allowed)

Tournament details

  • The winning team gets 3 points. The losing team zero. If a match ends in a draw, it is decided by sudden-death penalty shootout.

In this case the winning team gets three points and the losing team gets one point.

  • Games are 14 minutes long.

sources: Wikipedia and Neos Kosmos

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