Feet stamp, clouds of breath fizz beneath the floodlights, laughter and greetings echo around a secondary school football pitch in the east end of Glasgow. It’s a cold Thursday night at the end of January, and two of United Glasgow FC’s teams are training. As the noise and movement settles into a routine rhythm, left-back Samuel Gebretsadik peels away from the shouting, running, occasional missed ball, and more laughter, to chat at the edge of the astroturf.

Gebretsadik was 19 when he came to Scotland from Eritrea, in East Africa, in 2015, seeking political asylum. He arrived without family or friends following, he says, “a very difficult journey”. Once in Glasgow, Gebretsadik had to adjust to the cold, to the customs, and to the food. However, not everything in the local culture of his new city was unfamiliar. At the Unity Centre, a collective organisation that offers support to asylum seekers and refugees from their base along the road from the Home Office in Govan, Gebretsadik met some other young men from Eritrea.

“They told me they were playing with United Glasgow’s development team,” he says. “They said this was a team that also welcomed players who were not from Glasgow. I used to play football back home, and so I started to play for them too. The guy who was coaching, Alan, said I was playing a wee bit better, so after two months I moved to the first team.”

Now 21, Gebretsadik has been given refugee status, and is looking for work. In the meantime, the regularity of training, games, and the camaraderie and social life that underpins them, has not only helped to provide him with a structure to his life, but also, crucially, a sense of belonging.

“I want to work, I need to work to survive in life, but I want to play football too,” says Gebretsadik. “I’ve got the refugee judgement to stay in the UK for five years, so I am able to work and to travel anywhere, except my country. I am still looking for a job, I am hoping that will come. But football is important in my life. I don’t feel good if I don’t play football. If we are off for a holiday then I have to go to the park with my friends! Football is essential.

“United Glasgow is the best team I’ve ever known. There are people here from lots of different countries, it’s multi-cultural. You get to meet so many different people, and get to know about them, and learn about their culture. I really like that, and I have made friends here now in the club.”

Gebretsadik joins his friends, his team-mates, for their warm-up. It’s just a couple of degrees above freezing, and training is soon underway, just as it happens at hundreds of other amateur clubs across Scotland. However, United Glasgow FC are a little different to many other amateur clubs in Scotland.

Alan White, the coach Gebretsadik mentioned, founded the club in 2011, when he was still a student. However White, now an education worker with Show Racism the Red Card, has remained a driving force at United Glasgow as it has continued to grow. From a team set up initially to help target the isolation, and sense of exclusion, suffered by many asylum seekers and refugees, the aims of United Glasgow, in the true spirit of their name, are now all about inclusivity and anti-discrimination. The club’s commitment to those values is also reflected in the fact United Glasgow last year became a registered charity.

First published in Nutmeg 7. You can read the full article here