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Football with heart – West Bromwich support Chile Earthquake Appeal

By Victoria Watts
March 10, 2010 at 7:10 pm

Football generally tends to stay below my radar – I never turn over the newspaper and on a Sunday, I routinely remove the sport and business section as soon as it hits the doorstep. In fact, I am definitely part of the “what’s all the fuss about?” group of people, and the whole furore over John Terry, Ashley Cole etc really passes me by.

But today I heard some lovely football news. At Tuesday’s game against Sheffield Wednesday, West Bromwich wore shirts emblazoned with Help Chile and the Red Cross Chile Earthquake Appeal website address.

Seeing as the camp of people I don’t belong to – the people who eat and breathe football – is pretty huge, this is obviously a great thing – spreading the word and using the popularity of the game for an excellent cause.

The team, also known as the Baggies, did the same thing in January for the DEC Haiti Appeal and auctioned the shirts off afterwards to raise a total of £25,000 for the appeal.

As most of the teams seem to use their shirts for corporate advertisers, I am pretty impressed by this gesture. I noticed that Barcelona do the same for Unicef and Aston Villa have Acorns Children’s Hospice on theirs. Sheffield United also played all their 2008 pre-season games in shirts featuring a British Red Cross China Earthquake Appeal slogan, and in January Manchester City held a collection for the Haiti appeal at a game against United.

So although I still don’t get the immense popularity of football and am bemused by the amount of money it generates, I’m happy to see that some of those funds go towards a great cause. Thank you West Bromwich!

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 10th, 2010 at 7:10 pm and is filed under Fundraising and events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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