Coaching for Life is our programme in collaboration with Save for Children at the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan, home to displaced Syrians who have fled the civil war.
Launched in 2018, Coaching for Life combines Save the Children’s child protection expertise and Arsenal in the Community’s sports for development experience to build vulnerable children’s mental, emotional and physical wellbeing through football. Since the programme started, more than 5,000 children have graduated.
Our coaches in Za’atari include students from our Coach Development Programme, a two-year course based at The Arsenal Hub that offers comprehensive education from our coaches and industry experts and involves leading and supporting sessions across our range of Arsenal in the Community projects at home and abroad.
Here, two of our CDP students reveal how Coaching for Life has changed their own lives, as well as those of the coaches who have graduated from the course and the children who are taking it now.
Zahrah is 20 years old and was born and raised in east London. She became involved with Arsenal through the Coach Development Programme to gain football coaching experience.
“I was inspired by the club’s community values and support from family and friends,” she says. “Once I’d completed my first year of the CDP I had the opportunity to travel to Jordan to experience Coaching for Life, our programme in collaboration with Save for Children at the Za’atari refugee camp, which is home to Syrians who have fled the civil war in their home country.
“Coaching for Life launched in 2018, and I learned during my first year on the CDP that it combines more than 100 years of Save the Children’s child protection expertise and Arsenal in the Community’s experience of delivering sports for development to build vulnerable children’s mental, emotional and physical wellbeing through football.
“I was intrigued at how we were able to deliver this community programme in such a challenging environment, and I was inspired by Coaching for Life’s goal, which is to give children back their childhoods, help them rebuild their lives and coach them towards a better future. Once I discovered that more than 5,000 children had graduated from the programme, and that a growing number of them were girls, I wanted to do my bit to help more of them.
“Before joining the programme, I worked on Arsenal in the Community projects such as walking football, Premier League Stars and our primary school sessions. I gained valuable experience and felt ready for the challenge. Although I was nervous about the trip, my excitement to meet new people and explore helped me adjust quickly once I was there.
“Once I was embedded in the camp I spent most of my time with the female coaches, bonding, sharing stories and learning from their resilience. Together we developed activities and resources to engage children, creating a space for them to express themselves, connect with others and find joy through football.
“Seeing the impact first-hand was deeply moving. For the children, it was more than just a game – it brought normality, confidence and hope in a challenging environment.
“This work makes a profound difference in their lives. In a place where hope can be hard to come by, these moments of connection, learning and play create a sense of belonging and possibility that can transform how they see themselves and their future.
“Working with Save the Children was amazing and inspiring. It is an experience that, no matter where life takes me, I will always remember.”
Pranav is 24 and was born in India, but now lives in London and, like Zarah, first joined Arsenal on the Coach Development Programme.
“I have always been passionate about football, and during my Masters in Scotland I had taken up football coaching to earn some money and just get more involved in football,” he says. “I wanted to get into football as a sports psychologist, but after joining the local grassroots club I started falling in love with coaching.
“Towards the end of my Masters I was looking for a way to progress my career in football and I came across the Arsenal’s CDP. I applied like I did for 100 other roles, laughing to myself and thinking, ‘Fat chance anything is coming out of this,’ as I was in a tiny village in Scotland. But it did!
“The role interested me because I knew I had a lot to learn in coaching. I had been working on a lot of community sessions at my grassroots club and I wanted to work on Arsenal in the Community’s disability football section. The main attraction was the community side, but also I was a boy from India and just being inside a Premier League organisation was far beyond any of my wildest dreams.
“Before Coaching for Life, I put myself forward for anything and everything at the club and I believe I experienced as much as I could with Arsenal in the Community. I worked in primary schools, on the grassroots Football Plus side and with senior citizens who had prostate cancer. I helped run the Whittington Park League and I worked on the Freedom from Torture sessions with refugees. I was also selected to work with Arsenal Football Development and the Arsenal Pre-Academy.
“One of the biggest reasons I wanted to get involved in the Za’atari project was due to our coach Drew Tyler. Drew has some of the best ideas of coaching that I have come across. Also the experience of working with refugees in a camp in Jordan is an opportunity that comes across once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. I was lucky enough that I got to experience it twice. Coaching children and being around good people brings me genuine joy and I think Drew had noticed that as well, and thought it would be good for me.
“There was a lot of nervous and anxious energy in me before the trip because at that time the political climate in Jordan was not the safest. Having Drew and the Save the Children team was an absolute blessing as from the day we arrived they did everything in their power to make us feel safe and comfortable. I believe I’m quite adaptable, and within two or three days I felt at ease and lost all that nervous energy. The Save the Children team in Jordan are absolutely amazing, taking us out for meals in the evening and making sure that during the day at the camp we had someone with us all the time if we needed anything.
“Our days at camp were simply incredible. Our jobs were to mainly conduct coach education sessions for the coaches within the camp, so in the first week we conducted a workshop for two days and then watched coaches deliver the sessions and gave them feedback, introducing them to new games they could play with the kids around the resilience activities and topics of that week.
“The topics were really important within that setting because they were helping the kids at camp be kids. It’s so common for children to start working at a very young age and having to deal with camp life, so the pitches were actually a place where the kids could just be themselves and at the same time learn a lot about emotional regulation, communication and other topics that they probably wouldn’t ever have had the chance to learn about.
“The programme is an absolute game-changer for the girls at the camp. As a man I wasn’t able to see a lot of the sessions, but I caught glimpses of the girls leaving the sessions and they used to be so happy and filled with joy. For the boys the football was more of a competition and a chance for them to prove themselves in front of their friends.
“I saw the impact Coaching for Life has through one of the junior coaches. He was at one point one of the children who used to attend the football sessions, and he went on to become a coach who was very understanding of the disparity between men and women in the camp, and who understood the importance of the topics we were trying to teach the children.
“On a personal level the trip made me develop a lot of gratitude, and helped me realise that happiness sometimes is genuinely a choice. Seeing those people at camp have so much love and so much warmth despite living in such difficult circumstances put a lot of things in my own life into perspective.
“Initially I found the trip to be hard emotionally because I was finding it difficult to deal with the unfairness and cruelty of the world. It was heavy at times to listen to some of the people’s stories. It is very hard for me to say exactly what I learned on that trip, to write something that encompasses it all, but what I can say is that it has changed me, in so many ways, for the better.”
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