Canal 11 – serving football and society in Portugal

The channel has become the cornerstone of the Portuguese Football Federation’s content innovation project, which also includes the Portugal football school – a higher education initiative focused entirely on football.

Canal 11 is an innovative content platform, with more than 50 professionals dedicated to it. The television channel promotes Portuguese football through more than 750 broadcasts a year of live matches (other than the top two men’s divisions and matches of the men’s senior national team), with a special focus on women’s and grassroots football, and also showing other Portuguese Football Federation (FPF) competitions, including futsal and beach soccer.

Social and responsibility component

In addition to the sports dimension, the channel’s programming has a strong social and responsibility component, providing the viewers with special content that promotes inclusion, diversity and accessibility: “Canal 11 has exactly the same goal as the FPF: to get more boys and girls involved in football. In order to achieve that, we count on the immense quality of young Portuguese footballers and also on the great passion that the Portuguese people have for the game. It is not by chance that we have good TV audiences in the 15–34 year-old segment, and we have already had periods, at night, with more women than men watching us,” said Pedro Sousa, the channel’s director, who sees the project as “a content platform,” much more than “merely a television”.

'Promote, protect and develop football'

"We want to help “promote, protect and develop football,” continued the person responsible for the FPF project, whose broadcasts started on 1 August 2019: “Competitions which are perhaps not conducive to large TV audiences now have a platform to gain exposure and grow. It is worth showing what has not been seen on Portuguese television until now: Canal 11 shows many women’s matches, youth football and much more futsal.”

In addition to boosting football and futsal participation, Canal 11 is also committed to changing perceptions and improving the atmosphere around the game: “We like to debate and discuss tactical aspects; we like to invite those who understand the game and can explain it. We believe that as we talk more about the game, more people will be interested in it and more people will want to play it or become spectators and consumers,” Pedro Sousa added.

This edited article originally appeared in UEFA Direct 197