adidas Foundation Recovery Through Sport 2026: €6 Million for Up to Three Multi-Year Strategic Partners, Expressions of Interest Closing 30 August 2026

adidas Foundation Recovery Through Sport 2026: €6 Million for Up to Three Multi-Year Strategic Partners, Expressions of Interest Closing 30 August 2026

The adidas Foundation opened an Expression of Interest on 15 July 2026 for a programme it calls Recovery Through Sport. The commitment behind it is €6 million, the intended outcome is up to three long-term strategic partnerships with an initial horizon of at least three years, and the submission window closes on 30 August 2026 at 23:59 CEST.

Read the call carefully and you will notice how much of it is written in the negative. It is not a request for project proposals. It is not a short-term grant. It is not a competitive bidding process in the usual sense. The Foundation is not asking for budgets, activation plans, MEAL frameworks or logframes at this stage. What it is asking for is a description of what your organisation already is — its psychosocial practice, its safeguarding systems, its reach across crisis settings, its willingness to build something jointly rather than deliver something specified.

That framing matters more than it might appear. Organisations that treat this as a standard proposal exercise and submit a polished programme design are answering a question that was not asked. The eight narrative questions in the form are about institutional capability and posture, not about a project you would run with the money.

Key Details

What the Foundation Is Actually Funding

Recovery Through Sport is built on a specific claim: that after a crisis, sport and structured physical activity do something for children that is hard to get any other way. They restore routine. They create a reason to be somewhere at a set time with the same people. They give a child a small amount of agency and a place to belong when almost everything else has been decided for them by adults, borders or weather.

The Foundation frames the goal as supporting children and young people “as they rebuild their wellbeing, confidence and sense of normalcy after crises.” It is careful not to present sport as therapy in itself. The programme sits at an intersection — humanitarian response, mental health and psychosocial support, child protection, and sport for development — and the partners it wants are organisations that already stand at that intersection rather than at one corner of it.

Three things follow from that. First, a pure sport-for-development organisation with no MHPSS depth is a weak fit. Second, a clinical mental health organisation with no experience running physical activity for large groups of children in unstable settings is also a weak fit. Third, and most importantly, the Foundation says explicitly that it does not want to fund “business as usual” — work that continues exactly as it does today, with a larger budget and no space to test, adapt and generate evidence.

The Foundation describes itself as evidence-informed and says it is serious about evidence, serious about safeguarding, and serious about quality. Those three words recur. Treat them as scoring criteria in plain language.

Who This Fits, and Who It Does Not

This call fits an international or multi-country organisation that can honestly say all of the following without stretching:

• MHPSS capacity is institutional. There are people whose job is psychosocial technical quality, and they are not attached to a single grant that ends next year.
• The organisation operates in more than one crisis-affected or recovery setting, and could run this work in several without building a country office from scratch.
• Sport or structured physical activity is a real part of delivery, either directly or through established implementing partners.
• Child safeguarding is a system, not a document — with reporting lines, trained staff, incident handling and consistency across every context of operation.
• The leadership genuinely wants a co-created programme, including shared governance and shared decisions about pace, and is not simply tolerating that language to access €6 million.

It does not fit a small national organisation running a single excellent project in one location, however good that project is. It does not fit a consortium assembled in August specifically to bid. It does not fit an organisation whose safeguarding policy was last reviewed in 2019 and applies in theory to field operations that have never been audited against it.

If you are in the second category, the honest move is to note the Foundation’s other programmes — Play for the Lead, Play for Pride, Playing for Purpose and its Sport for Development work in places including Lesotho, Belgium and the Netherlands — and watch for calls sized to your organisation rather than spending the last weeks of August on a submission you will not win.

Eligibility and the Capabilities Being Assessed

The Foundation sets out what partners must demonstrate. In substance, six capabilities:

1. Appetite for co-development. Shared decision-making and joint governance, described as close collaboration on programming, ways of working, learning and pace.
2. Established MHPSS capacity. Not an interest in mental health, but technical capability the organisation holds.
3. Operational reach. Presence across multiple crisis-affected or recovery settings.
4. Sport and physical activity experience. Directly delivered or through partners, but real and recent.
5. Robust safeguarding systems. The wording is that they “operate consistently across contexts” — consistency is the tested property, not existence.
6. Institutional interest in research, learning and evidence creation. A stated willingness to be studied, to change practice on the basis of findings, and to publish.

Alongside these, standard eligibility confirmations are required in the form, and legal registration plus non-profit status must be evidenced with documents. The call page does not spell out geographic restrictions on where partners must be headquartered; the illustrative settings referenced include Haiti, and the framing is global. If your registration country or operating model raises a genuine question, that is exactly what the FAQ process exists for — check the Monday updates and the published webinar materials before assuming either way.

What the Expression of Interest Asks For

The submission has four parts:

• A short organisational snapshot.
• Eight narrative questions.
• Standard eligibility confirmations.
• Five required documents.

The call page names four of the documents directly: your safeguarding policy including child safeguarding; a two-page summary of your MHPSS expertise and technical approach; proof of legal registration and non-profit status; and your most recent annual financial statements. The complete list, along with the exact narrative questions and any word limits, sits in the downloadable EOI guidelines on the call page. Do not reconstruct the questions from summaries — including this one. Download the guidelines and write against the actual wording.

The two-page MHPSS summary is the document most likely to decide your outcome. Two pages is short enough that vagueness is visible. A strong version names the frameworks you work within, states who holds technical authority in your organisation, describes how psychosocial quality is supervised in the field rather than designed at headquarters, and gives one or two concrete examples with enough specificity that a reviewer could verify them.

Timeline: What Happens After 30 August

The Foundation has published its full process, which is unusually generous and worth planning against:

Two implications. First, the gap between submission and shortlist notification is short — under two weeks — so keep senior availability open in the second half of September for selection calls. Second, the joint working session in Germany in November is a five-day commitment for people who can speak for the organisation. That is the co-development promise made literal, and it should be diaried provisionally now rather than negotiated in October.

The Foundation also states plainly that selection at EOI stage does not constitute a partnership commitment from either side. October due diligence is real, and it will look at the same things the EOI asked you to assert.

How to Prepare in the Time Remaining

With the deadline on 30 August, the work splits into two tracks that can run in parallel.

The document track. Retrieve your current safeguarding policy and read it as an outsider would. If it does not cover incident reporting, staff conduct, recruitment vetting and how it applies to partner-delivered activity, that gap will be noticed. Pull your most recent audited financial statements and confirm they are the latest available; a set two years old invites questions about financial management you do not want to answer in a first submission. Confirm your registration documents are current and available in a language a German foundation can process.

The narrative track. Assign one writer, not a committee. The eight questions are about institutional character, and answers written by five departments read like five organisations. Interview the people who actually hold the knowledge — the MHPSS lead, the safeguarding focal point, the country directors in your two hardest contexts — and write from those interviews.

Before submitting, watch the published webinar recording and read every FAQ update issued on the Mondays of 3, 10, 17 and 24 August. Funders answer questions in FAQs that they consider decisive, and applicants who skip them consistently make the mistakes the FAQ was written to prevent.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Submitting a project proposal. The call says explicitly that finished proposals, budgets, activation plans, MEAL frameworks and logframes are not wanted. Sending them signals that you did not read the guidelines.
• Overstating MHPSS capacity. October due diligence will test this. Claiming institutional capacity you do not have wastes months and damages a relationship with a funder that is likely to run further calls.
• Treating safeguarding as a compliance attachment. The Foundation asks about consistency across contexts. Describe how the policy behaves in your least-supervised operation, not your best one.
• Ignoring the “business as usual” exclusion. If your answers describe continuing exactly what you do now, you have failed the central test. Name what you want to try, test or learn.
• Missing the co-development question. Shared governance means giving up unilateral control of programme design. Organisations that cannot do that should say so rather than promise it.
• Leaving submission to the final day. The window closes at 23:59 CEST on 30 August, which is a Sunday. Portal problems on a Sunday night rarely get resolved.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is this open now? Yes. The window runs 15 July to 30 August 2026, 23:59 CEST.

How much can one partner receive? The Foundation states a €6 million total commitment across up to three partners. It has not published a per-partner cap on the call page, and the split is presumably part of what gets negotiated in co-development and contracting.

Can we apply as a consortium? The call page as published does not address consortia or sub-granting. Check the guidelines document and the Monday FAQ updates rather than assuming.

Do we need to be based in Europe? No headquarters restriction is stated. Legal registration and non-profit status must be evidenced.

What if we do sport but not mental health? You are unlikely to be competitive. The intersection is the point of the programme, and MHPSS capacity is listed as a required demonstration.

Is there a second stage? Yes — shortlisting in early September, selection calls in late September, due diligence in October, a joint working session in Germany in November, and contracting through to the end of 2026.

Official Links and Next Steps

The single authoritative page is the adidas Foundation’s Expression of Interest for Recovery Through Sport: https://www.adidasfoundation.org/rfp/expression-of-interest-recovery-through-sport. It carries the EOI guidelines download, the online submission form, the webinar recording and slide deck, and the rolling FAQ.

If you are a fit, do three things this week: download the guidelines and read the eight questions in their real wording; check that your safeguarding policy and latest financial statements are current and retrievable; and get the 9–13 November working session provisionally held in the diaries of the two or three people who would represent the organisation. Then write the two-page MHPSS summary first, because it is the hardest document and the one that carries the most weight.