What is Changing the Chants?
Changing the Chants has been a two-year project, supported by the European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme. The goal was to deepen the understanding of approaches that football clubs can use to educate fans on antisemitic behaviour in the football stands. Changing the Chants built upon two separate educational programmes for football fans, one run by Borussia Dortmund and the other by Feyenoord. These discerning educational initiatives were exchanged and analysed, and new approaches were piloted, paving the way for practices in which – among other methods - restorative justice is applied.
Outcomes: Good practices & Guidelines
Racism, discrimination and antisemitism in stadiums are no isolated incidents, but a continuous problem in all of football and must be solved as such. This project facilitated a space for shared learning and exchanging different pilots, aiming to find and analyse more similar approaches across Europe. These findings were published in a compendium of good practices. Furthermore, the insights of the piloting, exchanging and compendium helped to create practical and transferable guidelines and recommendations for football communities, and football clubs all over Europe and beyond. Football communities seeking to combat antisemitism through non-formal education will thus be able to develop their own meaningful programmes and to prevent and respond to manifestations of antisemitic hate speech.
