If you’ve had any sort of interaction with United, you will have heard of the Manchester United Foundation. It pops up on match days, in club comms, and little donation prompts online sometimes.
The name tells you it’s some sort of charitable organisation, but most people haven’t looked into it too deeply. And yet, the foundation is one of the things that makes Manchester United a real club, not just a football team. It represents a huge part of what United really is.
The Manchester United Foundation is a registered charity associated with the club, and its purpose is to use the pull of the Man Utd brand to improve the lives of young people and strengthen local communities.
Off the pitch, it’s probably what I am most proud of as a United fan, and here’s why.
What The Foundation Does
At a very basic level, The Man Utd Foundation is the club’s charity side, set up to deliver various different community programmes. It runs projects, employs staff, arranges player visits and puts coaches and youth workers into local schools etc.
It’s not just a football thing. Its mission is to help young people make positive choices in their lives.
They focus on three broad areas:
- Health
- Social Wellbeing
- Employability
So you see it’s not really about football at all. It’s not another scouting network or anything like that. Football is just the tool they use to unlock confidence, friendships, safer choices, better health, and a route into education or even work.
Who Is It For?
The foundation is obviously based in Manchester, and this is where most of its efforts are focused. It works across all 10 boroughs in Greater Manchester partnering with primary and secondary schools in all of them, so it genuinely is an organisation for the whole community.
It also runs outreach programmes beyond Manchester, such as London, Carlisle, Derbyshire, and Northern Ireland. So while the heart of the foundation is local, its impact is felt much further afield, albeit on a smaller scale. They often partner with ex-players in these regions, for example, John O’Shea was involved in Northern Ireland.
In terms of the people the projects are aimed at, it’s almost exclusively children and young adults. A lot of the work is aimed at school age kids, but occasionally they extend into early adulthood.
Examples of Programmes Run by the Foundation
The best way to understand what The Man United Foundation is all about is probably to talk about some of their biggest programmes, so here goes.
By the way, it’s not uncommon for current and ex-players to turn up as part of these programmes from time to time, so the first team is tied in with it.
Street Reds and Community Sessions
This is arguably the foundation’s most well known community project, and it’s a good example of using football as the hook rather than it being the purpose.
Run in partnership with the Sir Bobby Charlton Foundation, Street Reds is free for kids between 8 and 18 years old, and it takes place in local areas rather than at a United facility. So the foundation goes to the kids rather than making the kids go to the foundation.
The children attend football sessions run by Manchester United Foundation coaches, meaning they have a safe, inclusive place to play and have fun in the evenings. It’s not just football either, they run alternative activities and provide opportunities to gain new skills and even qualifications in things like sports, leadership, first aid, and workplace skills.
There are also inclusive versions of Street Reds for kids with disabilities or additional needs.
Partner Schools And Primary Reds
This is where some of the more serious work takes place.
For high schools, the partnership model focusses on schools in areas where there is high deprivation. Each partner high school has a full time high school officer based at the school during term time, so it’s a real commitment from the foundation, not just a monthly visit.
They call it ’embedded delivery’, which means there is a consistent presence, the chance for relationships to build over time, and the opportunity to spot issues early in order to be proactive rather than reactive.
In primary schools, they call it Primary Reds, and everything they deliver is in line with the national curriculum. It gives teachers and students resources that focus on physical literacy, healthy lifestyles, and broader learning, and is delivered in partnership with Premier League Primary Stars.
This is how the Manchester United Foundation manages to reach so many children each year. The community sites are brilliant, but by getting into schools they come into contact with thousands of children each day.
Education, Skills, And Employability
You wouldn’t necessarily associate this sort of thing with football clubs, but education, skills, and employability are all incredibly important areas, and the foundation offers an alternative way to support children with them.
The foundation’s 16+ education and employability work is about supporting teenagers approaching adulthood to progress into higher education, apprenticeships, and the world of work.
The key thing is that this is not delivered in a classroom miles away from the club. The Manchester United Foundation is linked into learning spaces at Old Trafford, including a Skills Lab which is an education environment inside the stadium.
It’s a more immersive learning experience which takes more of a workshop approach. This works better than a classroom environment for some young people. It’s not a magic fix for kids who have struggled at school, but it can be inspiring and motivating walking into a place like Old Trafford to learn new skills.
Disability And Inclusion
A perfect example of how the Manchester United Foundation help people who are often overlooked, is Ability Counts.
Described as the Foundation’s PAN-disability football programme for disabled young people, it is for peopled aged 5 to 25 years old. It takes place at The Cliff training ground, where the first team used to train.
As well as playing football, the programme offers routes into volunteering and coaching. It’s a core offering of the foundation, not just an add on, with more than 100 participants every week across several different sessions.
Impact
This is where you know the foundation is doing things properly. It’s not some corporate company’s attempt at portraying themselves as ‘charitable’, there is a measurable impact.
The Manchester United Foundation holds themselves accountable for the money donated to them by measuring their impact from year to year.
For the 2024/25 season, they reported the following headline figures:
- 41,289 young people impacted
- 517,304 free-of-charge attendances
- 49,000+ hours delivered across 125 projects
- £61,256,384 in social and economic value, with £11.57 generated for every £1 spent
The report from the 2023/24 season reported equally impressive numbers, so the scale of the success of the foundation is consistent.
The key figure for me is the attendances. Over half a million free attendances for kids and young people tells you something about the impact the Man United Foundation is having, through football sessions, activities, workshops, not to mention the intangibles like relationships built, friendships made, social skills developed, etc.
The impact is massive.
How You Can Get Involved or Support
The foundation relies heavily on donations, so you can give directly or by buying tickets for the match day lottery and rounding up when making purchases online.
The club make it possible to contribute in lots of ways, so if you interact with United at all you will get the opportunity. Fundraising through events is another option, whether it be a run, shaving your head, a pub quiz – anything where people can sponsor you or collectively raise money. Equally, you can go direct to the foundation to make a one off donation.
In terms of getting involved yourself, Street Reds is a great entry point suitable for almost everyone. But the best thing to do is look at all the programmes the Manchester United Foundation is running and simply contact them about joining:
They will be able to tell you where and when their events are taking place and how to sign up.
Why I Love The Manchester United Foundation
I always support the Manchester United Foundation when given the opportunity to do so. It’s usually just by drip feeding donations at checkout or buying the match day lottery ticket, but just imagine if every fan did that. Imagine the impact we could all have.
I support the foundation because I think clubs like ours have a responsibility to give back to the communities that built them. And I think Manchester United do this better than most.
I believe we show the best of ourselves as people and as a football club when we can use the very thing that brings us together, that makes us what we are, to do good in the world. For Manchester United that is our brand, our badge, our history, our stadium. We can use that to create opportunities for people who rarely get them.
We don’t have to pretend that modern football is perfect, but the Manchester United foundation is the clearest example that big clubs can and do give back, and United leave a genuine social footprint in Manchester and beyond.