WoiC was established in 2022; we’ve run football activities every year since, with International style football tournaments for adult men from different parts of the world. Our activities are aimed at the diverse communities of Merseyside, but participants take part from beyond these boundaries. We also engage in educational activities, around heritage with professional football clubs’ academies. We had representatives from South Korea, Italy, Ireland, Ghana, Sudan, Eritrea, Guinea Bissau, Brazil, Bangladesh, Rest of The World, Iran, Somalia, Somaliland, Yemen, Jamaica, all the West Indian islands, Zimbabwe, Libya, England, Nigeria, Kurdistan, Poland, Portugal and Congo. In the football tournaments each national group submits a 20-man squad along with a management and coaching team and this remains throughout. The qualification process begins in March and the publicity and promotional work will run alongside this until the main event runs through June and July with the celebration event happening in August. This is then supplemented by ad-hoc activities with working with the community to educate different groups of people on the power of heritage, especially aspiring young footballers. People are allowed to engage and spectate at the event for free. We also run mini coaching and participant activities around the matches to get more women, children and non-team representative members of the public involved. The WIOC events also provide opportunities for volunteers to engage with the running of the events, from stewarding, event planning and media duties. We engaged with over 10,000 members of the community whether it was through participation or spectating, we engaged with over 10 different regional and sub-regional media outlets, we had over 3 million interactions on social media. We have 3 steering groups for football planning, media planning and community engagement which act as a legacy for future events and expanding them. It was a successful year that will be expanded upon and will grow again in the coming years. Our hope is to double engagement revenue and social impact year on year. The hope to expand our sporting reach into Cricket and Basketball in the following 12 months, was successful for our cricket ambitions, and with the success of a Sport England funding application, we will be reporting on the success of that project in next year’s reports. This now enables the cricket extension of our program to be sustainable for 2026 onwards. In 2025 we had 28 different community groups engage in our football based event in Liverpool which ran across the month of July. At the end of July we launched a cricket initiative introducing 4 communities to the fold that we have not worked with before taking our engagement to 42 different community groups representing over 50 nations based out of the Liverpool city region.

We have built and continued to drive 3 steering groups as well as an expanded sub-board for the WiOC as a legacy of our project. We also engage each of our communities to measure impact. The 3 steering groups work on the football planning and mapping that out, year on year, to maximize participation, media planning to work on the image and brand of the CIC so that as many people across the UK and the world can see the great work that is being done and to try to get more people involved at all levels and finally we have a community steering group that is all about our social impact and the work being done beyond the football to impact mental health, pride in ethnicity and promote diversity. The 32 managers [of each team] make up the football steering group and meet quarterly to drive the model of participation. This group works on driving participation and engagement to be more inclusive.

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No transfer of assets other than for full consideration