ENABLE Sweden is an independent organisation that works to secure multi-stakeholder collaboration between the main stakeholders in Swedish football. ENABLE Sverige wants to:

• contribute to the positive and sustainable development of Swedish football, where the football sector, supporters and police work together to identify and achieve common goals.
• contribute to a nuanced, knowledge-based and inclusive public debate about the opportunities and challenges that football offers.

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Corporate Engagement Award: Best Sports and Leisure Programme

The ENABLE Sweden Cooperation Model wins Gold at the Corporate Engagement Awards 2019 in London!

We are thrilled at ENABLE Sweden to have achieved international recognition, on June 12th 2019 we won first prize – Gold – at the Corporate Engagement Awards held in London. The award for the Best Sports and Leisure Programme was part of the section named “Partnerships”. The jury’s decision making was based on our approach to the highly charged public debate around football and rewarded the systematic collaborative model we have developed to ensure a positive and sustainable work within those conditions. Part of the motivation:

”Judges agreed the project identified a clear problem and worked collaboratively to deliver the solution. It had a ’fascinating methodology and [was] very well thought out, with a strategic focus,’ said one judge. Another added, ’A valuable piece of work addressing a significant issue within the footballing community in Sweden, developing best practices that can be applied in other countries to address similar issues.’”

Among the contestants in the same section were giants like Heineken in collaboration with the UEFA Champions League. Obviously, to win in such a strong competition made us particularly proud.

However, we want to emphasize that we also see the prize as an award for the Swedish football model and its actors in a broad sense. They too are recipients of this prize. Despite a recent strategic conflict of interests in Sweden between the football community and the Police, we as an organisation have always experienced a strong commitment from all of our central partners. The Swedish Football Associaion (SvFF), the league organization Swedish Elite Football (SEF), the Swedish Footballsupporters Union (SFSU) and the police have all played important roles and contributed with knowledge in our strategic development. Participants representing these organisations have engaged in constructive dialogues in all our activities whether it has been strategic talks, observations, workshops, meetings, seminars or conferences. We hope and believe that what we are doing together can help bring everybody’s working relations back on track, as well as help preventing future conflicts.

Another two very central partners should be seen as recipients of the prize. One is the Gålö Foundation and its general secretary Ingemar Persson, whose confidence, encouragement and financial support have been a prerequisite for our work, partly by at an early stage ensuring long-time funding. The other is Lundquist Srl, who for a long time have been assisting us in sustainability and communication issues. They were, among other things, extremely supportive in the preparation of the report “Providing Perspective on Swedish football”, which was a great reason why we were awarded the CEA prize.

Finally, we would like to thank Professor Clifford Stott and Keele University, UK. Clifford Stott, together with Filip Lundberg Verendel, started what was then the ENABLE project and played a central role in the activities from 2014 until our reorganization into ENABLE Sweden in January 2018. Keele University still has a role in the organization via Neil Williams, who is part of our steering group and whose doctoral research is joint funded by ENABLE Sweden and the university.