They Are Footballers

"Even though we were far away, every time we saw him on the broadcast, we felt like we were right there with him," she says. "From home, we cheered him on, shouted his name, and celebrated every moment as if we were in the stands. The distance didn't stop us from feeling every emotion alongside him."

Four years ago, there would have been nothing for her to watch.

Two games in Detroit, sixty in Paris
Special Olympics was founded in 1968 and today offers training and competition opportunities for more than 5.1 million athletes and Unified partners across more than 200 countries and territories, with close to 60,000 competitions every year.

For most of the organization's history, its only global multi-national competition events were the World Summer and Winter Games, multi-sport program based on the Olympic model, with no single-sport competition anywhere on the calendar. That changed in 2018.

"The Unified Football World Cup was our first effort to take the world's most popular sport and leverage it for Special Olympics, giving our footballers around the world an opportunity to compete in that specific sport on a global stage," says Jon-Paul St. Germain, Vice President of Sport Development at Special Olympics International.

The second edition, in Detroit in 2022, was Jeff Lahart's first Special Olympics competition. Lahart is the Senior Manager of Global Coach and Football Development at Special Olympics International, and he came into the organization from a football coaching and analysis background. In Detroit, he found a tournament that left almost no trace. "We only had two games in the whole competition livestreamed and recorded," he says. "The two finals, the men's final and the women's final for Division One." Everything else happened once, in front of whoever was standing there.

"What I would want to be able to do is watch my game back, share that information objectively with my team to show what we did well and where we can improve, but also use it for opposition analysis," Lahart says. "So introducing the idea of just recording games was step one. To assist coaches and give them the tools they'd have access to at any other competition, or even any grassroots club these days that has a video camera."

Paris, in July 2026, was the third edition and the first held outside the United States. Twenty-four teams, twelve men's and twelve women's, brought more than 300 players from 23 countries to Charléty Stadium and the pitches of the Paris International University Campus. Each team was made up by footballers with and without intellectual disabilities competing together on the same team through Special Olympics Unified Sports®. Special Olympics put eight Veo cameras on site across four of those pitches, running up to six at a time. Sixty games were recorded. Almost all of them went out live.

The feedback came back from nearly every region the Special Olympics Sport Development team spoke to. Staff, families and friends had been watching from Thailand to Namibia, Côte d'Ivoire to Colorado. The world was watching.

"With the cost of living, the cost of travel, and the distance involved, that's not accessible or achievable for people to do," Lahart says. "But by being able to livestream the games, we provided that access to family members, friends, program staff, and media from those countries as well. And if they didn't want to get up at 3 or 4 a.m. to watch the game live, it was still available for them straight after."

Special Olympics is all about accessibility to sport and positively changing attitudes towards individuals with an intellectual disability. Veo provided this access to families, friends, and supporters to cheer on their team, access that has not previously been available at this scale. The broader visibility also allowed new audiences to see the quality of play and experience the impact of inclusion through sport that Special Olympics showcases every day.
 
Coaches clipping games at night
The coaching in Paris was a level Lahart hadn't expected. Thailand's Head Coach, Chownee Phanlar, is the assistant manager of the Thai women's national team, the UAE Head Coach works for the football federation, and Paraguay's Head Coach is a professional club coach.

"We were stopped a couple of times by delegations saying thank you so much for having this, because now they were able to do their analysis each night," he says. "They were sitting down, clipping games, showing the recordings to the players, and not only reviewing their own games but the opposition's too."

Everyone in Paris wanted to win and to take something home, he points out. "Being able to reflect properly on performance, highlight what went well and should be reinforced, and give teams the opportunity to prepare appropriately for their next game, I think that's a huge piece. That's the baseline now that we want to improve on going forward."

Teams at the Unified Football World Cup are grouped by ability rather than seeded. After group play, they were assessed and placed into three divisions, so that similar teams met each other. "You're maybe at a different level, but our job is to ensure you have a competitive experience at that level you're at," St. Germain says.

Statistics they can stand behind
Special Olympics writes a technical report after every competition, and until this year it was built on numbers counted by hand and manually entered. "There's a high percentage of potential error," Lahart says. This year's report draws its statistics from the video, with clips inside it.

"I think it gives us so much more credibility as an organization when we're showcasing our competitions and matches and can back it up with statistics," he says. "If somebody asks who the top scorer is, we're able to tell them. The same statistics I can look up on Livescore or FotMob or the UEFA website for a Champions League match, I'm now able to see for a Special Olympics Unified Football World Cup match."

The numbers went into the event itself. Much of what was said about each team at the closing ceremony came from match data, and St. Germain used the same statistics on air while doing color commentary on the finals for ESPN and Disney Plus. "We weren't just handing out a gold medal or telling people what place they finished," he says. “We were able to tell you this team conceded the least amount of goals in the competition, or scored the fastest goal of the competition.”

Lahart is still in the system most days, reviewing footage, analysing statistics, and pulling goals.  "The goals are assets and something for us to be proud of, and the leading scorer in the women's competition, Costa Rica's Tryana Barrantes Nuñez, can have every one of her goals in a playlist sent to her", he adds.

The first full archive
For Niamh Nelson, Senior Manager of Storytelling Activation and Sport Communication at Special Olympics International, the tournament produced something the organization has never had.

"It's the first time we've had a full digital archive of a single sport for us, in any event," she says. "We have individual games, individual clips from other global events, but nothing from start to finish."

Programs, sponsors and prospective hosts can now go in and see the standard of play across all three divisions. Officials for the next edition, in Asunción in 2028, can be trained on footage of the last one, the way Special Olympics worked with the French Football Federation to recruit officials for Paris. "So while it's wonderful at a video comms level, it's also great as a development tool for another program, team, sponsor, or host, which we haven't had in the past," Nelson says.

From athletes to footballers
Throughout its 58-year history, Special Olympics has worked to change how people with intellectual disabilities are seen, and St. Germain describes that work in two phases.

"The first 50 years of this organization, with the vision from our founder, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, was focused on bringing people with intellectual disabilities out of the shadows and onto the playing field, showcasing their capabilities," he says. "There was this transformation in talking about people with intellectual disabilities as able Special Olympics athletes."

The next phase is more specific. "Now we're at the next phase, which is to no longer just refer to everyone as a Special Olympics athlete, but to distinguish each individual by their chosen sport identity. In this case, we're talking about the transformation of people with intellectual disabilities who play football into being seen as footballers first."

Making that language stick takes evidence. "The only way we can talk about people as footballers is if you've got the stats, you've got to have the highlights, you've got to show them in their uniform performing as footballers," St. Germain says. "Wherever you are in the world, if you're a footballer, you have a commonality, you're part of a global tribe. This is what inclusion through sport looks like”.

Rodolfo traveled to Paris as a member of the Special Olympics Paraguay team. He came home with a bronze medal from the men's Division One, a set of clips with his name on them, and a country that had watched him get it.

"Every time I saw the Paraguayan flag, I felt immense pride," he says. "I thought about my family, my teachers, and all the people in Paraguay who were following the competition and cheering me on." Representing his country again, he says, "was about fulfilling a dream, overcoming challenges, and showing that with hard work, anything is possible. I'm taking away wonderful memories from Paris, new friendships, and moments that I will cherish forever."

His mother watched it all from Asunción, hours out of step with the pitch her son was standing on. In 2028, the tournament comes to her city.

"For me, beyond the result, the most important thing was seeing him fulfill a dream, share the experience with other athletes, and carry the Paraguayan flag with such pride," she says. "Rodolfo showed us once again that with effort, dedication, and love for what you do, there are no limits to achieving your dreams."

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