FC Porto Foundation wins Liga Portugal social responsibility award | OneFootball

FC Porto Foundation was honored with the Social Responsibility Award by Liga Portugal, following an initiative carried out with Luísa, a young Dragons supporter. Luísa herself attended the award ceremony and ended up taking the trophy home.

“First of all, I want to thank FC Porto for this very beautiful gesture of giving her the award. Obviously, FC Porto does not do this to win awards, but they were happy to receive it and wanted to give it to her. The phrase ‘falling is part of it, getting back up is a choice’ was written by her. People sometimes ask, ‘who wrote it?’ and I say it was her. Hopefully, this phrase will be enough to help FC Porto become champions this year. (…) It is a spectacular gift. She even had doubts at first and said she wanted to stay in front of the television every minute to watch everything, but then she was very happy. She also chose the celebration. Thiago Silva had a great conversation with her, in which he invited her to walk out with the team, and she is waiting for that moment. All those moments have been good for her, because they give her extra strength to try to overcome her difficulties,” said José Santiago, Luísa’s father.

“Our recognition is seeing Luísa’s joy, the joy of the other children and of our supporters when we carry out this kind of initiative. The greatest recognition is looking at Luísa and seeing her happiness. Awards are never our priority; of course we are happy when these actions are recognized by outside organizations such as Liga Portugal, but the most important thing is being able to bring joy to these children. I want to congratulate our teams who put these initiatives into action, drive them forward and get involved. These awards make us feel recognized and we want to keep doing more and more. We always feel that we have to do more and that maybe we do too little. Ambition is what sets our Club apart, because we are never satisfied with what we have. That is part of our DNA. We carried out this initiative, but we are already thinking about what else we can do and what we should have done. We want to do more and more and reach more people. That is our goal as a Club and as a community,” explained Tiago Gouveia, FC Porto’s Marketing Director.

Paulo de Mariz Rozeira, Executive Director of Liga Portugal, presented the award. “Social responsibility and FC Porto have gone hand in hand for many years. This is already the third award we have presented to FC Porto, and the second for Social Responsibility. There have been so many awards that FC Porto now even shares them with the people who help make these social responsibility initiatives happen, in this case Luísa, who received the award with great joy and also received an FC Porto shirt. I think she is leaving here happy. All of this began on a day when Liga visited São João Hospital as part of the project ‘This Gown Has Powers’ and through the interaction that was created there between the players and Luísa. Then, during the visit that coach Farioli made with her, this wonderful project emerged, in which we should also highlight the participation of FC Porto’s coaching staff and players who, as can be seen on social media, were hugely committed to this project and helped make Luísa happier. Awards also serve that purpose: to motivate all clubs to do more and do better. That is what they have been doing; we have been distributing awards throughout the country, and it is a joy to see that this is the case,” he said.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇵🇹 here.