Mata himself has used this platform to establish the Common Goal movement, set up in 2017 with Jürgen Griesbeck, the CEO and founder of an NGO called streetfootballworld. He asked fellow members of the football community to commit at least 1 per cent of their salary to supporting worthy causes worldwide. Where Rashford points to the memory of childhood hardship when explaining his efforts to effect change, Mata had a different kind of family example in his sister, Paula, who has worked on UN projects in Ethiopia and Iceland.
“She’s been doing amazing work around the world in different countries, and so she’s my mirror – I just want to be like her,” he reflects. “She’s living her life and using her time in many ways to help other people, and I thought that I could do the same since I’m a professional football player.”
Four years on, Common Goal now has more than 200 players and coaches signed up as members. Its supporters include Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp, Bayern München winger Serge Gnabry, and Chelsea’s two-time UEFA Women’s Player of the Year, Pernille Harder; adidas have committed too. The charity has distributed more than €3m to 58 community organisations, as well as launching eight collective projects and a Covid-19 response fund.
“It’s been a great journey, over four years,” says Mata who, prior to the pandemic, visited projects that Common Goal supports in Colombia and India to see for himself the impact being made. “In some ways, it has been very quick, in others long and difficult, but overall, I’m very happy and proud of what we have done, of what we are as a movement.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s the president of UEFA, Aleksander Čeferin, who is a member, or a player in the third division in England or Spain – for us, [just having] the will to join the movement is already a success. We have over 200 members, plus businesses, leagues, and other people and personalities in the football world, so we’re happy with where we are, and of course the dream of this movement since we started is that, out of the total revenue of profits from European football, 1 per cent of that goes to charity and to help many kids around the world through football. We’re getting there, and I think sooner or later, we will make our dream a reality.”
