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Football Together: Alberto Cei’s Research on Inclusion Through Sport

What Alberto Cei and colleagues reported from the 2017 Soccer Together programme, including mixed motor and football outcomes.

By 6 min read

In football, inclusion is often described as a question of access: can a child join a team, attend training and take part? Research asks a more demanding question. What must the environment provide for participation to become meaningful, and how can progress be observed beyond technical sporting skills?

In 2017, Alberto Cei and four colleagues examined these issues through a naturalistic football intervention involving children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Their publication on the Soccer Together Program offers an early contribution to the study of inclusive football environments.

A programme rooted in everyday sport

The project involved 30 children aged six to thirteen recruited from public schools in Rome. The researchers were interested in psychosocial, motor and football-related competencies, examining them within a community-based programme rather than treating them as entirely separate areas of development.

This setting was central to the work. A sport programme has routines, relationships, instructions, physical demands and moments of cooperation. Studying it in context allows researchers to consider the experience of participation as well as discrete technical outcomes. The design also requires care when assigning causes to observed changes: naturalistic interventions involve many influences that cannot always be separated neatly.

The publicly available research record identifies the sample, setting and aims. Specific conclusions about the magnitude of effects need to be anchored in the complete paper and its assessment details. The significance of the research should not be inflated into a promise that football produces identical benefits for every autistic child.

Rethinking the idea of a successful session

A conventional football assessment might begin with ball control or passing accuracy. An inclusive programme may also need to consider understanding of instructions, comfort with shared routines, participation with peers and communication with coaches. These are not interchangeable outcomes, and they do not all develop at the same pace.

For practitioners, the research invites a more useful question than whether a programme is simply “inclusive”: inclusive in what ways, for whom and according to which observations? Building a meaningful experience may require individual goals, adaptable activities and ongoing communication with families.

A study that entered the wider literature

The 2017 publication was subsequently discussed in a 2020 review of football and autism, which included the programme in a comparative table. A 2025 systematic review on motor-skills and physical-activity interventions among children with ASD also cited the research. These references document its presence in a developing literature, rather than proving that subsequent programmes replicated its outcomes.

The contribution of Soccer Together is to place organised football within a serious research discussion about participation, motor learning and psychosocial development. It shows why the design of the environment deserves as much attention as the drills performed within it.

What inclusive participation requires

A football club may describe itself as inclusive because registration is open to everyone, yet the practical experience of participation depends on much more. The instructions, the predictability of activities, the behaviour of coaches and the opportunities to engage with peers all affect what a session asks of a child. The 2017 Soccer Together research placed those concerns within an organised sporting environment rather than an abstract discussion of access.

Studying a naturalistic intervention means observing a programme in which relationships and routines develop alongside motor learning. This makes the research relevant to real-life coaching but also complicates causal interpretation: multiple influences may change over time. The importance of the study is not that it resolves every question, but that it gives a documented example of examining football-related and psychosocial development together.

Later reviews that cited the programme located it within a developing literature on physical activity and autism. A club wishing to learn from this literature should begin with the specific participants, activities, support and measures of the published programmes, rather than reproducing a label and expecting an identical outcome.

What the research asks of clubs

There is a practical difference between offering a session and designing a learning environment. A club might provide the same pitch, ball and schedule to every participant, yet some children may require changes to communication, pacing or task demands before participation becomes meaningful. Research into inclusive programmes brings these organisational choices into view. The sport is part of the intervention, but so are the conditions under which the sport is experienced.

The Soccer Together study's naturalistic character makes it relevant to the complexity of community-based practice. It also means that researchers must be careful when connecting outcomes to specific elements of the programme. Relationships between participants, coaches and families develop alongside technical instruction, and their influence cannot always be separated through a simple before-and-after comparison. This limitation does not remove the study's contribution; it identifies the boundaries within which the contribution should be discussed.

An organisation seeking to learn from Cei and colleagues' work could begin by documenting the aims of its own programme. Is it attempting to support participation, football-related motor skills, social interaction or several domains together? Who will observe changes, and what would count as evidence of progress? These questions are more rigorous than copying exercises from an unrelated group and expecting identical results.

The fact that later reviews included this research shows that it became part of a larger discussion about physical activity interventions. ALTIUS can use that academic trail to help practitioners locate the original work and follow the conversation without claiming that citations provide a universal endorsement of one programme.

What the investigators actually recorded

The published abstract offers more than a description of the programme's aims. Parents were interviewed at the beginning and end of the training period about aspects of psychosocial functioning, including communication, socialisation and behaviour. The researchers also used ten quantitative motor-skill assessments, alongside parent reports about movement and engagement with the ball. That combination is important: observations by families and measurements of movement are different kinds of evidence, and each should retain its identity when the findings are reported.

The investigators reported statistically significant improvements on six of the ten motor tests. Football-specific development was more uneven. For the measure described as running with the ball, 39.3% of children showed no improvement, 28.6% reached an intermediate level, and 10.7% reached a medium-high level. These categories, taken from the published abstract, should not be presented as a complete distribution of all outcomes; the abstract does not explain every remaining category. They show, nonetheless, why a claim that all participants progressed in the same way would misrepresent the research.

Parents perceived improvements in psychosocial and motor abilities for many children, with differences related to the severity of autism as described in the study. This is an account of the reported observations, not an assertion that football alone produced the changes. The research took place in a particular naturalistic programme, and its conclusions should be read within that setting.

The most valuable finding for an inclusive-sport reader may be this combination of progress and variation. A programme can generate encouraging measured results while still leaving some participants without improvement on a given football task. Responsible coaching and research communication should make space for both facts.

Where This Research Has Been Cited and Discussed

Original journal: International Journal of Sport Psychology, 48(5), 485–507 (2017), by Cei, Franceschi, Rosci, Sepio and Ruscello.

Related books and chapters by the research team, not verified as independent citations: the Accademia Calcio Integrato publication catalogue lists a 2018 chapter on Calcio Insieme in Sport e inclusione and a 2019 article in Scuola dello Sport. They help document dissemination of the programme but are not presented as independent studies confirming the 2017 findings.

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