FIFA brought Frantic a socially compelling brief: to lead creative production on a series of animated films for Football for Schools, a global mass-participation programme built to support the education, development and empowerment of boys and girls aged 4 to 14, with accessibility and inclusivity at its heart.
For the first time, Football for Schools partnered with FIFA Medical to bring health awareness and wellbeing into the programme. The aim was to enhance health literacy, safety awareness and wellbeing through content accessible to every child, regardless of language literacy, culture or socio-economic background.
The creative brief asked for a highly visual, football-themed animated series that communicates through imagery as much as words, removing language as a barrier to learning. The harder part was the subject matter: medical education, mental health and wellbeing, serious topics that had to feel familiar and compelling to the largest possible number of children worldwide.
The scope was substantial: 11 animated films, 11 printable infographics and 11 teaching guides, structured across three distinct age groups of 4 to 7, 8 to 11 and 12 to 14, and subtitled in eight languages including Arabic, Kirghiz and Tajik. Total delivered animation came to 24 minutes, covering subjects from handwashing and dental hygiene through to CPR, mental health and menstrual health. A 30-second trailer was also produced for FIFA’s social channels.
Scripts, character design, storyboards and full animation were all completed in-house over nine months by a team of five. The project meant close collaboration with FIFA stakeholders and alignment with WHO recommendations and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, while staying practically deployable in low-resource school and community settings around the world.
Two creative challenges ran in parallel throughout. The first was getting the tone and depth of information right for each age group. What works for a seven-year-old learning about handwashing needs a completely different register to a fourteen-year-old navigating mental health.
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Senior Projects Manager, FIFA
The second was finding a meaningful creative thread back to football for every subject, however distant the topic first appeared from the game. Football had to be the constant, the thing that tied a lesson on dental hygiene and a lesson on CPR into one recognisable world.
The solution was three distinct character worlds. For the youngest group, friendly, non-threatening jungle animals. For the middle and older groups, relatable human characters who could model behaviours more directly. Each series carried its own visual language and voice, including appropriate voiceover talent sourced across all three age ranges, with subtitling then applied across eight languages to maximise global reach.
Football gave children a familiar, trusted context in which to encounter unfamiliar or sensitive subjects. Just as importantly, it gave educators and coaches a natural hook into discussions that might otherwise feel outside their remit.
The series has reached 1.6 million views on YouTube alone and sits within the Football for Schools programme infrastructure across 153 countries, giving teachers and coaches direct access to it as classroom and training resources.
The impact has been most visible in the CPR content. Children who watched the Heart Heroes United episode were able to perform CPR at the correct pace and technique with almost no additional instruction. The animation alone was sufficient to transfer a potentially life-saving skill to primary school-age children.
That matters most where it is needed most. In communities with limited access to formal first aid training, a child who can perform effective CPR is a child who could one day save a life.
The series is also being activated at FIFA Fan Festivals across five host cities, with a hands-only CPR initiative underway using the infographics and, potentially, the films themselves. Its modular structure means it keeps finding new contexts well beyond its original deployment, in schools, coaching programmes and community health settings worldwide.
