Few can deny the appeal of football and its cross-cultural reach. From a brand’s perspective as well as from an individual one, football is one of the few sports that is universally recognised and followed with a truly global reach. Digitally, that means an endless source of support as well as limitless entrepreneurial opportunity.

With the emergence of digital media in its current form (internet, social media etc), household brand names have used football as well as the power of attraction of freestyle football tricks to communicate and engage with their consumers. In capitalising on football’s universal appeal, we founded the Freestyle Football Federation out of the desire to bring football, in a non-traditional sense, to the world to entertain and to pilot social engagement problems bullying, nutrition awareness and anti-social behaviour reduction in communities.

The sport has grown only because of Social Media in the past 15 years and we are consistently seeking out new ways and technologies in which to share our videos. We focus all our communications through Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and provide live event updates and streams through these channels too, which are then directly shared by the athletes to reach their networks.

The event continues to roll on through Freestylers sharing videos through platforms as well as YouTube, Twitter and Facebook which allows them to benchmark against friends all over the world and learn new moves too.

Utilising the 1000s of freestyle football videos on YouTube, the Freestyle Football Federation has continued to get bigger and bigger, holding more events in more areas of the world like Brazil and the Czech Republic.

The advent of industry events like TEDx has also fostered the growth of the event as we continue to look for new platforms to promote the Freestyle Football Federation and its events.

Coming up in the UK on 5th and 6th September is the UK and Ireland Championships, which will be held within the Soccerex Football Festival, Old Granada Studios in Manchester. The event is free to attend and will feature some of the biggest names in the world of freestyle football. Andrew Henderson from Cornwall is protecting his title, but has some strong competition from many other athletes including Tom Folan, Daniel Dennehy and John Farnworth.