Soccer fandom to enhance maternal health

Mother’s Day on Sunday marks the launch of an modern program to enhance maternal health by harnessing the ability of soccer fandom.

The World Health Organization says maternal mortality is unacceptably high. Greater than 700 women died every single day in 2023 from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, based on a WHO fact sheet released last month.

It is a challenge that doctors, public health authorities and community staff have been attempting to tackle.

Former skilled soccer player Morad Fareed thinks he could make progress improving maternal health through a love of sports.

Fareed’s created FC Mother, a community platform pairing expectant and recent moms with a support network. The organization goals to show global football clubs into platforms to enhance public health, a broader concept he calls “H-sports,” or healing sports.  

“What we did was unify the world of maternal health and use football as a vehicle to distribute it, to rejoice it, and to gamify it,” said Fareed.

The organization is kicking off what it’s calling the “World Cup of Healing” — a contest that measures health outcomes of the participating women, grouped by their reported soccer fandom. 

Moms access services and connections via the FC Mother platform after which answer regular survey questions that assess their wellbeing. Improvements fuel team progress.

FC Mother has some notable buy-in from researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard’s School of Public Health in addition to team doctors from Real Madrid, Manchester United and Arsenal FC. 

The initial competition launches on Sunday and runs for 60 days through the FIFA Club World Cup Final in July. This trial run pits three football clubs in Brazil and their associated fanbases of moms against three in america: Moms of San Diego FC, Moms of Gotham FC, and Moms of Omaha Union.

FC Mother ranked the 48 World Cup countries by maternal health outcomes based on data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation on the University of Washington. The institute’s Global Burden of Disease report puts america at forty fourth place, lower than some other developed country on the planet amongst that cohort based on life-years lost resulting from poor maternal health outcomes. Brazil ranks forty sixth.

Team USA within the inaugural health outcomes competition is coached by Jennie Joseph the founding father of Commonsense Childbirth, who was named as a lady of the yr in 2022 by Time magazine for her national work as a midwife specializing in improving maternal mortality.  

Fareed’s goal is to gamify community maternal health via football and prove that it might probably increase quality-adjusted life-years (QUALYs) for each moms and kids. 

A QUALY is one yr of life in perfect health, a metric that is getting used by major public health organizations. It’s measured with a survey that asks respondents to self-report mental and emotional health, pain levels and other health domains.  

While FC Mother leaves the medical treatment of pregnancy to clinicians, Fareed points to research that illustrates perinatal mental health and robust social support can generate as many as 10 additional higher-quality-of-life years for moms and their offspring. 

“The social determinants of health are the subsequent frontier of maternal health and public health normally,” said Fareed. “It is not your doctor who you are going to call. It is the community around you. It is the day-to-day interactions you’ve got living your life that drive stress levels, mental wellbeing, emotional wellbeing.”

Just like all other sport, FC Mother’s leaderboard features the stats of the competing teams, however it also offers opportunities for the users to access immediate support from other mothers. Those features can be found via the FC Mother App or through Meta’s WhatsApp.

But FC Mother is not a charity. Fareed intends it to be a for-profit enterprise. He believes corporations, skilled sports, family offices and donor-advised funds will likely be concerned with investing in a platform that delivers health improvements for a fraction of the present costs of medical intervention.

FC Mother hopes the kickoff competition will provide proof-of-concept and persuade 40 football clubs to take part in a he maternal health outcomes competition throughout the World Cup in 2026.  

— CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.