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4th August 2017
02:33pm BST

"Every time someone signs for a team, when the salaries are paid, when the accounts come in, at clubs, federations, agents and associations, 1% goes direct to social projects. No one looks at it and says, 'Hey, what’s this 1% here?' because everyone knows. "Collectively football takes on a social responsibility, we set a new agenda, it’s understood that a part of what football generates goes to social projects. If you do it alone it’s hard but if you bring people together … It can be an engine for good, an act of social awareness within the system. We want to make it the new normal, the standard.""Football is incomparable to anything else," Mata adds. "Perhaps only music has that same power to transform society. We have to translate that into something real." At a time when club's transfer fees are being shattered on a regular basis and - in the case of £198m Neymar and a host of players now operating in the Chinese Super League - weekly salaries are up around £300,000, it is heartening to see Mata putting himself and this charitable initiative out there.
Using Neymar's PSG transfer as an example, 1% of that transfer fee going into the collective fund would see just under £2m going to good causes across the world.
Fair play. A good idea and we hope it works.
Even thinking about it makes us feel better about football already.Explore more on these topics: