FC Mother wants to leverage global soccer fandom to improve maternal health

Mother’s Day on Sunday marks the launch of an innovative program to improve maternal health by harnessing the power of soccer fandom.

The World Health Organization says maternal mortality is unacceptably high. More than 700 women died every day in 2023 from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth, according to a WHO fact sheet released last month.

It’s a challenge that doctors, public health authorities and community workers have been trying to tackle.

Former professional soccer player Morad Fareed thinks he can make progress improving maternal health through a love of sports.

Fareed’s created FC Mother, a community platform pairing expectant and new mothers with a support network. The organization aims to turn global football clubs into platforms to improve public health, a broader concept he calls “H-sports,” or healing sports.  

“What we did was unify the world of maternal health and use football as a vehicle to distribute it, to celebrate it, and to gamify it,” said Fareed.

The organization is kicking off what it’s calling the “World Cup of Healing” — a competition that measures health outcomes of the participating women, grouped by their reported soccer fandom. 

Mothers access services and connections via the FC Mother platform and then answer regular survey questions that assess their wellbeing. Improvements fuel team progress.

FC Mother has some notable buy-in from researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard’s School of Public Health as well as team doctors from Real Madrid, Manchester United and Arsenal FC. 

The initial competition launches on Sunday and runs for 60 days through the FIFA Club World Cup Final in July. This trial run pits three football clubs in Brazil and their associated fanbases of mothers against three in the United States: Mothers of San Diego FC, Mothers of Gotham FC, and Mothers of Omaha Union.

FC Mother ranked the 48 World Cup countries by maternal health outcomes based on data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The institute’s Global Burden of Disease report puts the United States at 44th place, lower than any other developed country in the world among that cohort based on life-years lost due to poor maternal health outcomes. Brazil ranks 46th.

Team USA in the inaugural health outcomes competition is coached by Jennie Joseph the founder of Commonsense Childbirth, who was named as a woman of the year in 2022 by Time magazine for her national work as a midwife focusing on improving maternal mortality.  

Fareed’s goal is to gamify community maternal health via football and prove that it can increase quality-adjusted life-years (QUALYs) for both mothers and children. 

A QUALY is one year of life in perfect health, a metric that’s being used by major public health organizations. It’s measured with a survey that asks respondents to self-report mental and emotional health, pain levels and other health domains.  

While FC Mother leaves the medical treatment of pregnancy to clinicians, Fareed points to research that illustrates perinatal mental health and robust social support can generate as many as 10 additional higher-quality-of-life years for mothers and their offspring. 

“The social determinants of health are the next frontier of maternal health and public health in general,” said Fareed. “It’s not your doctor who you’re going to call. It’s the community around you. It’s the day-to-day interactions you have living your life that drive stress levels, mental wellbeing, emotional wellbeing.”

Just like any other sport, FC Mother’s leaderboard features the stats of the competing teams, but it also offers opportunities for the users to access immediate support from other moms. Those features are available via the FC Mother App or through Meta’s WhatsApp.

But FC Mother isn’t a charity. Fareed intends it to be a for-profit venture. He believes corporations, professional sports, family offices and donor-advised funds will be interested in investing in a platform that delivers health improvements for a fraction of the current costs of medical intervention.

FC Mother hopes the kickoff competition will provide proof-of-concept and convince 40 football clubs to participate in a he maternal health outcomes competition during the World Cup in 2026.  

— CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.