After beating Portugal in the quarter-final of the 2022 World Cup, the Moroccan national team players celebrated on the pitch by dancing with their mothers. It hit me, because that’s how I used to celebrate with my mother when I was a footballer. It was a moment of joy, a celebration of motherhood – these guys took their mothers from the crowd and put them in the centre of the pitch at the World Cup, with 291 million people watching live.[1]
Inside FIFA. (2025) FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022: Global Engagement & Audience Report. Executive summary. Available at: https://inside.fifa.com/tournament-organisation/audience-reports/qatar-2022 (accessed January 2026).
But I wasn’t the only one who was moved by these images – they went viral around the world. Then I was struck by a surge of excitement, because I saw the answer to a question I’d been asking myself: Why is it that the largest, multi-billion-dollar initiatives in public health still only manage to reach a fraction of the population they aim to serve? How do you link public health research to the rest of humanity?
You talk in terms of their interests. Football is a truly global language and the world’s largest family, with an estimated six billion fans worldwide. It transcends religion, government, jobs, it transcends everything. I thought, if we can mobilise that family to support mothers, we can change the health of humanity – one pregnancy at a time. At that moment, the idea for FC Mother was born.
Two key findings on mothers’ health
I’d been working in maternal health for years before I had the idea for FC Mother. I wanted to go wherever the data led, and the Vatican invited me to set up a lab. We worked for two years with experts from Harvard, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, midwives, mental health practitioners, theologians, humanitarians – some of the best people I ever met in my life.
We discovered two key findings. First, when we measured the total loss of life years across all global health challenges, it turns out that maternal and neonatal disorders, such as chronic stress during pregnancy and pre-term birth, are the single largest cause of life years loss in the world: 194 million life years, every year.[2] That’s more than heart disease, stroke, cancer, you name it.
FC Mother. (2025) World Cup of Healing Report 2025. Available at: https://drive.google.com/uc?export=download&id=1AmSORRRtdTDerlA4uopWTp7K9Iz8VXmb (accessed January 2026).
Often in maternal health research, we stop at birth: “Mum didn’t die, baby didn’t die, congratulations.” But when you look at the whole life course, you start to see things like, “Mum has gestational diabetes, which means she’s ten times more likely to have type 2 diabetes later in life”.[3] We mapped every single prenatal symptom to life years. We found that inadequate maternal health support is the number one health problem in the world.
Diaz-Santana, M.V., O’Brien, K.M., Park, Y-M.M., Sandler, D.P. and Weinberg, C.R. (2022) Persistence of risk for Type 2 diabetes after gestational diabetes mellitus. Diabetes Care 45(4): 864–70. DOI: https://doi.org/10.2337/dc21-1430
Our second key finding was that clinical factors are actually a minority when it comes to mothers’ health. It’s 80% social. And if 80% of the problem is social, that means it’s the mum’s friends, family and community who are a big part of the solution. Pregnancy’s a team sport, that’s what the data tells us. But we’ve loaded the mother with all the responsibility. Instead, we have to build a support team around her.
When we published our white paper[4], I thought the whole world would say, “This is an addressable problem – we know who’s pregnant, it’s less than 5% of the population, it’s only nine months, it’s not that complicated. Let’s all work on it.” But that didn’t happen. I realised that the infrastructure to take action needed to be constructed, and I had no idea what that was – until I saw the Moroccan players celebrating with their mothers.
Square Roots and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. (2019) Improving Global Health through Better Maternal Environments (White Paper). Available at: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oOHHSA-KQT9_J0FNdw45UDWBPOfY4pUB/view (accessed January 2026).
Gamifying “assists” for mothers
The beauty of football is that there’s a football club in every single city in the world. There’s a relationship that exists with people that’s powerful. So with FC Mother we want to engage clubs to invite pregnant women to a special event. Bring your friends, bring your family, come and learn about this new programme, it’s free. It’s about you meeting other pregnant women and elder mothers in your city.
At these sessions, we ask pregnant women, “Who’s on your team?” Layer one is public health support – midwives, community health workers, doulas. Then layer two is friends and family – your sister, your partner, your mother-in law, whoever. We ask, “What are the things you would love assistance with?” It’s very practical, it’s things like, “I need some help around the house, I need some childcare, I need a ride.”
So in our new protocol, which we call “Assists”, mum chooses the players on her team, she chooses her problems to solve, and we use football rewards and football clubs’ platforms to activate the fanbase. When someone solves one of mum’s problems, they earn an “assist” – that’s the footballing term for when a player sets up a goal for their teammate. We’re gamifying “assists” for mum. And we ask the club to give rewards to those who get the most assists, whether it’s match tickets, jerseys, or a chance to meet the players.
We’ve been trialling this idea in partnership with the Brazilian club Flamengo, which has almost 50 million fans. It’s designed like a clinical trial, for a 1,000-day period (from pregnancy until the child’s second birthday). We onboarded a group of 79 pregnant women and a team of midwives, medical doctors, nurses and mental health experts. Our platform’s group chat in which the mothers interact has thousands of messages. It’s taken off like a rocket ship. As one mother shared:
I’ve spent a lot of time convening mothers’ groups in different parts of the world. It’s so hard to do that. Mothers are very busy, a lot of them are overwhelmed. But there was something so different about doing it in partnership with the football club and fanbase. Their partners got excited and shifted from fear to love – it was very sweet. It means something to mothers, and their families, to be recognised and celebrated by the local club they support at the centre of the pitch. It also showed us that engaging football clubs as maternal health partners creates a win–win–win that works at scale.
The World Cup of Healing
In football, the World Cup is the ultimate competition – even non-football lovers get invested. With our Flamengo trial results in hand, we started partnering with FIFA World Cup 2026 host cities who wanted to create world-class legacy initiatives within health. World Cup Host City Monterrey, in Mexico, became our first partner, and we are now expanding to three other host cities in the USA and one in Canada in 2026. We’ll implement FC Mother in these cities, and over the next five years they’ll compete to generate the most assists, funds and healthy life years for mothers within the “World Cup of Healing” competition.
Our primary implementation partners are the World Cup Host Committees and the local football clubs, helping us enrol pregnant women, recruit community health workers, and mobilise football fans to provide social support for mothers.
It takes time, effort and coordination. The key factor is that we don’t have to build anything – we’re able to piggyback on the global infrastructure of football and the World Cup by asking host cities to attach a really beautiful cause to it, to help generate a health impact that outlives the 39-day event. The response has been electric. Alejandro Hütt, Host City Manager for World Cup 2026 Monterrey, believes that:
The World Cup of Healing is a digital platform, and we’d love to work with any city that’s interested in enrolling. Through the unprecedented scale of football’s infrastructure and reach, we want to create the world’s largest dataset on mothers’ wellbeing. The anonymised data generated through our platform, which we started collecting with our pilot group in Brazil, will form the foundation for an open-source public health dataset, developed in partnership with our research collaborators at academic centres like Harvard, so everybody in the world can use it. We derive very practical insights by simply asking mums directly across global football communities, “How are you doing, how’s your social support, what do you need?”
With USD 2 trillion in available impact capital, six billion football fans and an unprecedented four world cups over the next five years, our platform engages a whole new audience. With strong third-party institutions helping to validate our impact, we have now proven a highly scalable and more capital-efficient way to deliver on the promise of not only supporting mothers globally, but celebrating them at the centre of the world’s largest sporting event.
