Lithuania’s long-term commitments yield life-changing results
|Proudly flying the Lithuanian flag ahead of the 3rd / 4th final match at the Seoul 2024 Homeless World Cup. Image: Anita Milas
By Fiona Crawford
You can only play in the Homeless World Cup once, but there’s no limit to the number of times you can turn up to support your team. That’s the implicit ethos by which the Lithuanian contingent operates, with many former players travelling internationally annually for the event held in diverse host cities. It’s an ethos that benefits the players off as well as on the pitch.
The Lithuanian team first attended the tournament when it was held in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2006. The team, facilitated by FK Feniksas (FC Phoenix) and through the impetus of Stasys Pranevicius and Giedrius Lubas, comprised players who had been experiencing alcohol addiction. (FK Feniksas is underpinned by an understanding that many former elite athletes and people experience drinking problems but there were, before the organisation formed, few in-country programmes explicitly designed to tackle the issue.) Nearly 20 years on, every player from that inaugural team is still alive and still sober.
|Lithuania at their first Homeless World Cup tournament in Cape Town in 2006. Nearly 20 years on, every player from that inaugural team is still alive and still sober. Image: Statys Pranevicius
Liutauras Fafalavicius was the goalkeeper for the Lithuanian team at that 2006 tournament. He, like many of the players who have been involved with the programme have since found employment and are now giving back to the programme to help sustain its work. He, like his teammates, quietly make their way through the tournament each year to both provide current players with support and to treat the tournament as a kind of touchstone. But the work and influence continues year-round.
‘Everybody is still playing football,’ the former players and organisers tell me just before heading down to prepare for a match. That perhaps at least partly explains the success of each player in managing their addiction. ‘Some people change their life 100% after the event,’ they explain. ‘Sometimes someone is still thinking: What are you going to do? But after that, definitely 0% go back to their previous life; 100% try to find new ways.’
The programme has adapted and grown with the players’ transitions. FK Feniksas has, for example, started a veterans league for the more mature players to graduate to so they can continue playing without having to match it physically with younger players newer to the programme.
|After nearly 20 years of playing at the Homeless World Cup, the Lithuanian side have an impressive haul of silverware. Image: Stasys Pranevicius
The strength of the programme and said younger players was evidenced by the fact that the 2024 team finished third overall in the Homeless World Cup—one of, if not its best, ever tournament finishes. 2024 player Saulius Cepkauskas was even named player of the tournament.
|2024 player Saulius Cepkauskas was named player of the Men’s Tournament at the Seoul 2024 Homeless World Cup. Image: Anita Milas
The result was a fortunate byproduct, not the endgame. The current and former players’ priorities were clear: football was the vehicle for addressing and providing support around bigger issues. For example, the 2024 team included a player Stanislav Tytyniuk who had sought refuge from the Ukraine war. He hailed from Kherson, a Russian-occupied territory, and his experience was recent and personal—his grandmother was injured around the time of the tournament through Russian bombing of her home.
|Image: Anita Milas
The Lithuanians have had firsthand experienced with Russian occupation—their families were, for instance, forcibly been dispossessed of their farmland and imprisoned in Siberia for 11 years. Throughout the 2024 tournament, the Lithuanians were offering steady, unassuming, grounded support to their teammate, as they did the Ukrainian team that attended the 2023 event.
The team gifts their opposition a yellow pennant before each match. One the one side, it features the programme’s name and founding date of 2006. On the other, it lists each tournament at which Lithuania has appeared from 2006 until the present. The list is now so impressively long that within a year or two the team will need to adjust the layout to find ways to make it fit. It’s a good problem to have.
With the 2025 tournament returning to the more geographically convenient Oslo, Norway, it’s likely Lithuania will again compete in the Homeless World Cup, and many of the core original playing group will again be in attendance. They’ll be in the crowd and pitchside, wearing an assembly of Lithuanian green, yellow, and red jerseys and supporter gear, a supportive presence for the players on the pitch and equally again experiencing the tournament and its benefits.
Words: Fiona Crawford
Images: Statys Pranevicius, Anita Milas
Lithuania are represented by FK Feniksas in the Homeless World Cup network. Find out more about their programme and how they’re using football to change lives in Lithuania.