West Ham United has celebrated the one-year anniversary of the Players’ Project.
The Project has been hailed as the most-ambitious community programme ever created by a Premier League Club, where players from the men’s, women’s and Academy teams have given over 300 hours of community time, directly working with over 2,000 people from the local community over this last year alone.
The Players’ Project, split into eleven strands, delivers over 30 programmes that span health, education, community initiatives and football development, which engage with up to 50,000 people per year.
All of the Club’s players, along with the staff supporting them, have passionately bought into these eleven strands. Whether it’s Club Captains Mark Noble’s work with tackling poverty and Gilly Flaherty spending time with the members of the over-65s supporter group, Any Old Irons, to new Club-record signing, Sebastien Haller choosing the Local Enterprise strand.
At the time of the launch of the Project, Baroness Karren Brady committed that West Ham United would invest £10m over three years, in addition to £13m that the Club had invested directly across education, health and social mobility projects since 2013, in the London Borough of Newham and surrounding Olympic boroughs and Essex.
The Club is proud to announce that just one year into the Players’ Project, £5m of this £10m has already been invested in local projects, taking the total to £18m. Now, West Ham United has committed to increase its commitment over the next two seasons and will invest a further £10m, an increase of £5m on its initial pledge, giving a forecasted investment of £28m by the end of 2021.
Watch our video from the anniversary event above.