Five English football teams are commissioning official poems for their clubs as part of a scheme to encourage youth literacy.
Any football fan who’s watched a game in the UK will be well aware of the complex – and sometimes questionable – chants that echo through stadiums. Now, five Premier League and Championship League clubs are set to receive their own official poems to add to their supporters’ linguistic legacy.
A Poem for your Club is a new initiative from the National Literacy Trust (NLT), a charity that campaigns for higher literacy across the UK, commissioned by Arts Council England and funded by The Compton Poetry Fund.
Blackburn Rovers, Stoke City, Crystal Palace, Luton Town and Portsmouth football clubs will each receive their own poet-in-residence who will run writing workshops and other activities to “unlock fans’ creative writing potential in the non-traditional environment of a stadium”.
As part of this scheme, the poets will also create an official poem for each of the clubs through collaboration with the local community “which will reflect the spirit and cultures” of the club and its fans “to inspire others and reinforce local pride”.
The scheme is just the latest in a set of initiatives run by the NLT over the past two decades to use football as a “literacy by stealth” tool to engage young people in reading and writing.
Local heroes
Poets chosen for the clubs so far are all locally connected to the clubs. Alan Barrett will work with Stoke City, Dan Simpson for Crystal Palace, Naz Knight for Luton Town, and David Swann for Blackburn Rovers.
Portsmouth is in the final stages of selecting its resident poet for the scheme.
The poets will also work with local charities and schools to engage the community in both the club and literature. For example, Barrett will work with Stoke Social, Stoke Memories, Potters Dementia Wellbeing group as well as local primary schools and other youth groups as part of his residence with Stoke City.
A Poem for your Club was inspired by the poem Jamie Thrasivoulou was commissioned to write in 2018 for Derby County Football Club. Thrasivoulou first performed ‘We Are Derby’ at a game between the club and local rivals Nottingham Forest in front of more than 31,000 people.
After the success of Thrasivoulou’s poem, Everton commissioned poet Paul Cookson to create a club poem that was used to launch the club’s 2018-2019 season ticket campaign.
Finding new ways to engage young people with reading and writing is high on the agenda for NLT. This week they released their latest national survey results which showed youth reading at its lowest levels since 2019.
For the first time since the NLT started surveying listening habits, more children said they preferred listening to books over reading them. As a result, the NLT is also campaigning for audiobooks to be included more in the national curriculum to encourage reading.
