UEFA Foundation for Children Call for Projects 2026: Worldwide Grants for Child-Focused Sport, Education, Health, and Humanitarian Projects — Closing 3 August 2026

UEFA Foundation for Children Call for Projects 2026: Worldwide Grants for Child-Focused Sport, Education, Health, and Humanitarian Projects — Closing 3 August 2026

Most sport-for-development funders are regional. The UEFA Foundation for Children is not. Its annual call for projects is explicitly open to organisations anywhere in the world, and the foundation states plainly on its own call page that its support “is not limited to projects in Europe.” Projects it has backed sit across Africa, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and Europe. If your organisation works with children and can build a credible case around sport, education, health, protection, or the inclusion of children who are usually left out, this is one of the few genuinely global doors that opens once a year.

The 2026 round is open now and closes on 3 August 2026, as stated on the foundation’s candidate registration platform. The call runs annually throughout June and July, so this is the tail end of the window rather than the beginning — which matters, because the application is a multi-part form that expects financial documents you may not have sitting in a folder.

This guide covers what the foundation funds, the criteria that will get a project rejected outright before anyone assesses its merits, how funding size is decided, how the portal actually behaves, and how to make the weighted criteria work in your favour.

Key Details at a Glance

What the Foundation Actually Funds

The foundation lists ten areas of focus, and your application should sit clearly inside one or more of them rather than gesturing at all of them:

• Access to sport — removing the cost, distance, equipment, safety, or social barriers that keep children out of organised play.
• Personal development — education, life skills, confidence, and the softer outcomes that sport is often the vehicle for.
• Disabled children — programmes designed for children with physical, sensory, or intellectual disabilities, not simply open to them.
• Healthy lifestyle — physical activity, nutrition, and health awareness.
• Conflict victims — children displaced by or living through armed conflict.
• Gender equality — girls’ participation and the structural reasons it stays low.
• Environmental protection — projects that address environmental impact alongside their work with children.
• Employability — pathways from adolescence into work and training.
• Infrastructure and equipment — pitches, courts, facilities, and kit. Notably, this is a funder that will consider capital items, which many child-welfare grantmakers will not.
• Strengthening partnerships — building the capacity of local organisations and networks.

Beyond the ten headings, the foundation frames its own objectives as helping children through health, education, access to sport, personal development, integration of minorities, and protection of children’s rights. It states that it may advise, work with, or support any organisation or project with similar goals, and that it may also provide humanitarian or emergency assistance. Its stated core aims are solidarity and development aid.

Who Can Apply, and the Three Institutional Deal-Breakers

The foundation publishes its assessment criteria as a short, unusually direct document. Criteria are split across two levels — institutional and project — and at each level into deal-breakers (compulsory; failure means rejection) and weighted criteria (used to rank projects against each other).

The three institutional deal-breakers are:

1. Legal identity. The organisation must be recognised by institutional partners or have been registered for at least three years. A brand-new entity with no institutional recognition will not clear this bar.
2. Financial transparency. Missing approved and published audits or financial reports for the last three years is a deal-breaker. Read that carefully: it is not enough to have kept books. The reports need to be approved and published, and they need to cover three years.
3. Ethics. Non-respect of the values and principles set out in the foundation’s ethics code disqualifies an application.

If any of the three is shaky, the honest strategic answer is often to fix it this year and apply next year, because these are threshold checks rather than matters of judgement. The three-year audit requirement in particular is the most common reason capable grassroots organisations are screened out of this kind of institutional funding, and it is fixable with a year of deliberate effort — or by applying as part of a coalition led by an organisation that already meets it.

The Project Deal-Breakers: Under-18 Majority, 20% Girls, No Talent Scouting

Three more compulsory criteria apply at project level, and each one has caught out otherwise strong applications:

• Activities must involve a majority of children under 18. Youth programmes that have drifted upward into the 18–24 bracket, or family programmes where adults are the main participants, fail here. You need beneficiary numbers, disaggregated by age, that show under-18s in the majority.
• Activities must involve at least 20% girls. This is a floor, not a target, and it is quantitative. If your current programme runs at 12% girls, a sentence about your commitment to inclusion will not substitute for the number. Either your design credibly reaches the floor, or it does not.
• Projects primarily aimed at scouting, training, or promoting young talent are excluded. This is the single most important sentence in the criteria for any football club, academy, or federation considering an application. The foundation is not a talent pipeline funder. A project whose logic ends in better players — even if framed around opportunity — sits on the wrong side of this line. A project whose logic ends in children who are healthier, in school, protected, or included, and which uses sport as the method, sits on the right side.

How Much to Ask For

The foundation does not publish an award range, and it is worth being precise about why: the criteria document states that funding “is not predetermined, but it must be proportional to the size of the project,” and that co-funding is encouraged. Third-party listing sites circulate specific euro ranges for this call; those figures are not confirmed on the foundation’s own pages, and you should not build a budget around them.

What this means practically:

• Proportionality is a test you can fail in both directions. An inflated ask against a thin activity plan reads as poorly costed. An implausibly small ask against ambitious claims reads the same way.
• Co-funding is scored. “Level of co-funding” is an explicit weighted institutional criterion, so secured or pledged contributions from other funders, local authorities, or your own reserves strengthen the application rather than suggesting you need less.
• Administrative costs are scored. “Level of administrative costs” is the other weighted institutional criterion. Keep overhead defensible and be ready to explain what it covers rather than burying it.

How Projects Are Scored: The Weighted Criteria

Once you clear the deal-breakers, ranking is done against a published list. At institutional level it is administrative costs and co-funding. At project level, the weighted criteria are:

• Number of beneficiaries
• Focus on children
• Children’s age range
• Level of girls’ participation
• Gender mainstreaming
• Inclusion of sports activities
• Environmental considerations
• Account taken of the local socio-economic situation
• General project context
• Relevance of projects to needs
• Collaboration with institutional partners
• Medium and long-term sustainability of activities
• Integration of local minorities and people of all abilities

Treat that list as your application outline. Every item is a place where a specific number, a named partner, or a concrete design decision beats a paragraph of intent. Three observations worth acting on:

Girls’ participation appears twice. It is a deal-breaker at 20% and a weighted criterion above it. Clearing the floor is survival; going well beyond it is where you gain ground. Note also that gender mainstreaming is scored separately — that is about whether your design accounts for why girls drop out (timing, transport, safety, coaching, family expectations, facilities) rather than only counting them at the door.

Sustainability is scored, and the ethics code reinforces it. The code states that the foundation ensures projects “do not leave their beneficiaries in a state of dependence,” and that projects are designed to have ongoing impact after completion. An exit story that depends on the foundation renewing indefinitely reads badly against both documents.

“Collaboration with institutional partners” is a scored asset you may already have. Ministries of education or sport, municipalities, schools, health authorities, national federations, and UN agencies all count. Letters or memoranda that name a partner and its actual contribution are worth more than a logo.

The Ethics Code and What It Signals

The foundation asks applicants to respect its ethics code, and the code is a reasonable guide to how reviewers think. Among its eleven principles: children’s rights as recognised in international conventions, with the child treated as a person in their own right; participation, meaning beneficiaries are listened to when needs are identified and solutions designed; independence from dependence; sustainable development including environmental protection and appropriate working conditions; partnership with local authorities, companies, and civil society; respect for local beliefs, traditions, and customs with no discrimination on grounds including gender, religion, political affiliation, or social status; active promotion and empowerment of women; effectiveness and continual assessment; probity, independence from politics, rejection of corruption and of child labour; and transparency about where funds come from and how they are used.

The most actionable of these for an applicant is participation. If your proposal can show that children and families were consulted in designing the project — and say how — you are speaking the funder’s own language. Alongside the code, the foundation expects safeguarding to be real: this is a children’s funder, and a project design that puts adults in contact with children without visible protection policies is a weak application regardless of its outcomes.

The Application Portal and How It Behaves

Applications are submitted through the foundation’s candidate registration platform at projets.uefafoundation.org, available in English and French. A few practical points, drawn from the platform’s own help pages:

• The form is split into parts. The platform refers to submitting a “first part” and to inviting a contributor to complete a further part. You are notified by email as soon as an invited contributor validates and sends their section — useful if a finance colleague owns the budget while a programme lead owns the narrative, but it also means the submission is not finished until every invited part is in.
• You receive a PDF confirmation. After submitting the first part, a confirmation email arrives with a PDF of what you submitted, and you can also view it under “My account / Manage my requests.” Save that PDF; it is your record of what the foundation actually received.
• Autosave exists, but do not rely on it as a substitute for drafting offline. The platform saves every two minutes, 30 seconds after a change, and when you move between screens. Even so, write long narrative answers in a document first, then paste them in — you keep a copy, you can count words, and colleagues can review before anything is submitted.
• Use a current browser and keep cookies enabled. The platform’s troubleshooting notes point to cookie problems and outdated browsers as the usual cause of login and navigation errors.

Create the account against a shared or role-based email address your organisation controls, not a personal one belonging to a staff member who may leave. The platform’s own FAQ describes the mess that follows when an account was created under the wrong address.

Timeline and What Happens After You Submit

The foundation states that it examines and evaluates every project submitted, and that the Board of Trustees takes the final decision at its autumn meeting, consulting external parties where necessary. It also notes that outside the annual framework, its statutes provide for exceptional decision-making mechanisms in emergency situations — relevant if you are dealing with a genuine humanitarian emergency rather than a planned programme, though the annual call remains the standard route.

Plan on a quiet autumn. Build your own contingency for the scenario where this grant does not land, and do not commit to partners or staff hires on the assumption that it will.

Common Mistakes

• Applying with fewer than three years of published financial reports. It is a deal-breaker, not a preference. Check what you can actually produce before you start writing.
• Submitting a talent-development project in inclusion language. The exclusion is explicit. Reviewers who work in football will recognise an academy proposal immediately.
• Missing the 20% girls floor and hoping intent covers it. Give the number and explain how the design reaches it.
• Counting participants without disaggregating by age. The under-18 majority requirement and the “children’s age range” criterion both need a breakdown.
• Leaving co-funding blank. It is scored, and blank reads as no other funder has been persuaded.
• Treating the ten areas of focus as boxes to tick. A project claiming all ten reads as unfocused. Two or three, done properly, is stronger.
• Starting in the last week of the window. The multi-part form with invited contributors takes coordination, and 3 August is a hard stop.
• Ignoring sustainability and exit. Both the weighted criteria and the ethics code push against dependence on the funder.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this only for organisations in Europe? No. The foundation states that its support is not limited to projects in Europe, and it lists funded projects across Africa, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and worldwide categories.

Do we need to be a football organisation? No. The call is open to all organisations and NGOs around the world that work with children. That said, “inclusion of sports activities” is a weighted criterion, and the foundation’s method involves football or sport in general — so a proposal with no physical activity component competes at a disadvantage.

How much can we request? The foundation does not publish a fixed amount or range. Its criteria state that funding is not predetermined but must be proportional to the size of the project, and that co-funding is encouraged. Build the budget your project genuinely needs and justify it.

Can we apply for a pitch, a building, or equipment? Infrastructure and equipment is one of the ten listed areas of focus, so capital requests are within scope. Expect scrutiny on sustainability, maintenance, and who will own and run the facility afterwards.

Our organisation is two years old. Can we apply? The legal identity deal-breaker requires registration for at least three years or recognition by institutional partners. If you have genuine institutional recognition, make that case explicitly and document it. Otherwise, consider applying through an established partner this cycle.

Can we apply every year? The call is annual, and the foundation runs it each June and July. Nothing in the published criteria bars a repeat application, but a resubmission should visibly respond to the criteria rather than repeat the previous file.

Is there a fee? No application fee is mentioned anywhere in the foundation’s published material for this call.

When will we hear back? Decisions are taken by the Board of Trustees at its autumn meeting. The foundation does not publish a specific notification date on the call page.

Preparation Checklist

Before you open the portal, assemble:

• Approved and published audits or financial reports for the last three years
• Proof of legal registration, or documentation of recognition by institutional partners
• Beneficiary numbers disaggregated by age and gender, for current work and for the proposed project
• A budget with clear administrative costs and any secured or pledged co-funding identified by source
• Named institutional partners with a description of what each actually contributes
• Your safeguarding and child protection policy
• A short, honest account of how children and families were consulted in designing the project
• A sustainability plan describing what continues after the grant ends, and who pays for it

Official Links and Contacts

• Call for projects page: https://uefafoundation.org/general-information/call-for-projects-2/
• Candidate registration platform (applications): https://projets.uefafoundation.org/en
• Ethics code: https://uefafoundation.org/general-information/ethics-code/
• French-language call page: https://fondationuefa.org/informations-generales/appel-a-projets-fr/
• Email: [email protected]
• Postal address: UEFA Foundation for Children, Route de Genève 46, CH-1260 Nyon, Switzerland

Always confirm the deadline, criteria, and required documents on the foundation’s own pages before submitting. The call closes on 3 August 2026 according to the foundation’s application platform, and the criteria summarised here come from the criteria document published on the official call page. Details can change between cycles, and the foundation’s own material is the authority.