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Home to the world’s largest mixed-gender football league, EL Play is redefining what leadership looks like—on the field and beyond. The program reaches over 6,000 girls and boys from government and low-income schools across India, Cambodia, Kenya, and Singapore, equipping them with critical life skills through the power of team sport.
At the heart of EL Play is a unique mixed-gender format where girls and boys train, compete, and lead side by side.
Through carefully designed, co-ed football sessions that combine technical drills with reflective leadership conversations, children develop key values such as confidence, collaboration, empathy, and respect.
What sets EL Play apart is not just the game—but how it’s played. Our league format ensures that every child—regardless of gender—gets an equal opportunity to learn, lead, and shine. With city-level leagues, regional competitions, and a national finale under the banner of EL Play ELevate, children experience the thrill of teamwork, the challenge of competition, and the growth that comes from shared success.
By breaking down gender barriers and fostering inclusive environments, EL Play is creating a generation of young leaders who believe in equality, lead with empathy, and carry the spirit of fair play into their families, communities, and futures.
EL Play uniquely integrates mixed-gender play at every level:
1. Life Skills & Mixed-Gender Drills – Builds communication, teamwork, and mutual respect in boys and girls together
2. Technical + Physical + Psycho Social Training – Each session focuses on joint mastery of skills, cooperation, and shared mental development
3. Game Application & Team Talk – Mixed teams reflect together on performance, fairness, and leadership lessons both on and off the pitch
The program’s pedagogy focuses, first, on the students building a love for the game, and developing their relationship with the ball and being able to manipulate, move it and feel comfortable with it. – Discovery Phase
Once the foundation skills of the game like passing, shooting, ball control and dribbling are established, the program focuses on mastering these technical skills through repetition, practice and understanding how they are used together. Comprehension of this relationship is essential to move forward from the basics. – Skills Acquisition Phase
The third phase of the program is focused on the application of all these football and life-skills in a regular football match, i.e. tactics, positioning, team dynamics and understanding the opposition. – Game Phase
A typical lesson would see students going through 5-6 different session components, starting from a Warm Up, moving to a Fun Activity, Skill Practice, and then Match Practice, with life-skills being taught implicitly and explicitly across all these components. Each session ends with a Cool Down and Team Talk. This session structure provides Coaches with avenues to debrief, discuss, and engage with the students at different times through different methods. This ability to focus on life-skills throughout the session is what sets us apart from conventional football coaching. The Team Talk and Fun Activity components explicitly focus on connecting the game to multiple positive values, traits and concepts, thus strengthening a child’s internalization of the life-skills learned on the pitch.
Each session of 90 minutes is broken down into 6 segments (Warm-up, Fun-Activity and Debrief, Technical Skill, Match Practice, Cool Down, Team Talk) with life-skills being taught implicitly and explicitly. Exemplar session plans and coach actions have been identified and created to assist the coaches in delivering the curriculum content better. It is imperative that the coach focuses on imparting 2-3 values every session that directly correlate to a life-skill as part of our leadership framework.
We believe in the healthy spirit of competition and believe that life-skills really come to bear in a competitive environment.
The coaches are instructed to design a feedback cycle with the children through which they reflect upon the game to highlight essential learnings from the experience.
The program aims to teach children the invaluable lessons of self-awareness, confidence, commitment and grit through football. With a structured curriculum and licensed coaches, EL Play looks to create an alternate reality for these children (both girls and boys), wherein they can freely express themselves and inherently imbibe critical life skills. The program aims to create well-rounded individuals that are not only self-aware but also possess a moral code and can think critically to become productive members of society.
The EL Play program impacts 6061 students across Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Dharwad, and Kumta in India, and students in Battambang, Cambodia, Singapore and Kenya.
On the field, he’s a natural: a vocal leader, a team player,
In the sun-baked fields of Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh, Santosh Yadav was a
Basavannemma and Mallamma represent a generation advocating for gender equality, a generation
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