Football Club Hercules

The club’s goal was to use the Lähirähinä (Neighbourhood games) ambassadors’ project to breathe new life into the once popular culture of shared and communal outdoor play and games.

Today, the levels of physical exercise are severely polarised: at the one extreme there are the sports enthusiasts and, at the other, many people who are tied to their mobile devices. For some people, the required commitment and the excessively goal-oriented nature of physical activity represent obstacles to participating, resulting in the two extremes moving further and further away from each other.

Through the project, the club has conveyed the message about low-threshold social and experiential physical activity and encouraged people to start using existing sports venues.

During the project, the club worked on an operating model that activates people to undertake environmentally friendly physical activity in their neighbourhood and integrate the App2Day application into the operating model to facilitate the organisation of outdoor play, games and shared transport.

In a wider scale, the emissions caused by physical activity can be dramatically reduced by improving the resource efficiency of neighbourhood sports venues (about 70% of the emissions caused by physical activity are emissions from transport to and from hobbies), not forgetting the benefits to public health.

Another small detail in the big picture is better success in sports as a result of a flourishing outdoor play and games culture. Our ambassadors all agree that the exercise children get in the back gardens of residential areas and in school fields without the involvement of sports clubs lay the foundation for all professional sports.

The Lähirähina project of Football Club Hercules is one of the Globe League finalists.