The FC Barcelona Foundation shows its support for refugees through messages from women’s and men’s first-team footballers

Two players from the men’s first-team squad, Marc Casadó and Wojciech Szczęsny, and two from the women’s first team, Irene Paredes and Ellie Roebuck, have spoken out about the grave situation that refugees and displaced people, whose numbers are increasing year on year, find themselves in. These video messages, carried out to mark World Refugee Day on 20th June, also outline the work done by the Barça Foundation in this field.

The commitment of the Club and its Foundation to the cause of refugees has been put into practice both through its own projects and in collaboration with other organisations and entities, gaining visibility in particular thanks to the global alliance signed with the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR/ACNUR) in 2022. This alliance has enabled the first-team men’s, women’s and Barça Foundation Genuine football teams to all wear the organisation’s logo on the back of their shirts.

Thanks to its alliance with UNHCR/ACNUR, the FC Barcelona Foundation has a presence in four countries in different continents - Türkiye, Uganda, Malaysia and El Salvador – which have, due to a variety of geopolitical issues and conflicts, taken in refugees and internally displaced persons.

The impact this collaboration is making was seen recently during the visit by Mexican actor Alfonso Herrero, a Barça Foundation member and UNHCR/ACNUR Goodwill Ambassador, to the Nakivale and Oruchinga refugee settlements in Uganda.

Uganda is the African country which receives the highest number of refugees and is home to over 1.8 million people forced to flee from the Republic of South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) and the Republic of Sudan, amongst others.

This visit also raised awareness about the Foundation and UNHCR/ACNUR’s collaboration with Coldplay and Spotify, where music and sport met to support refugees forced to flee their homes due to the increasing effects of climate change, in addition to conflict, hate or persecution. Specifically, all profits from the Coldplay T-shirt collection brought out ahead of the first Barça-Real Madrid clásico of the La Liga season will go towards sustainability projects in these refugee communities in Uganda.

Barça Foundation programs

Since 2017, the FC Barcelona Foundation has been working on its own programs involving refugees. In Europe this work is being done in Greece, through local Greek organisations at the refugee settlements taking in children and families coming from various countries experiencing conflict, as well as in Catalonia, through a number of projects aimed towards refugees and migrants. This includes the Joves Futur + project, which provides labour-market insertion opportunities for young migrants and refugees who have lost state support on reaching adulthood.

In every case, the Barça Foundation’s work in support of the refugee cause uses sport as a powerful tool to help make the lives of refugee and displaced children around the world more positive.

An unstoppable flow

According to the latest UNHCR/ACNUR annual report, in late April 2025 there were 122.1 million forcibly displaced people, compared with 120 million recorded at the same point the previous year. This means that the number of refugees and forcibly displaced people has increased year on year for the past decade. Major conflicts, such as those in Sudan, Myanmar and Ukraine, and a continued inability to prevent the fighting remain the main factors behind this displacement. 

Exhibition about refugees during the Civil War

This 20th June, World Refugee Day, will mark the start of the ‘Barça, More than a club; Montjuïc, a stadium of refuge’ Exhibition in Barcelona’s Montjuïc Castle, organised by the FC Barcelona Foundation and UNHCR/ACNUR in collaboration with Panenka magazine. Between autumn 1936 and spring 1937, in the thick of the Spanish Civil War, the Estadi de Montjuïc went on to host over 21,000 displaced people from all over the Peninsula. The Polish-born photographer Margaret Michaelis documented the day-to-day lives of the thousands of men, women and children who were accommodated in this sporting arena.

The collection of images in the exhibition shows the everyday lives of the displaced people in the stadium, some of whose facilities were transformed in order to meet their needs. There are photographs capturing classes being taught in improvised classrooms in the stands or on the pitch itself; physical-education and sport sessions; domestic tasks like cooking, hanging out washing or sewing; medical and dental care being provided; or simply day-to-day scenes from the dining halls set up in a stadium converted into a centre for displaced persons. 

This exhibition was inaugurated back in October 2023 in the very same venue, the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys, which for the past two years has hosted the home games of FC Barcelona. The collection of images was previously exhibited at the Barça Store & Exhibition Sagrada Familia and in the Casa Navàs de Reus, an impressive modernist building from 1908 by the renowned Catalan architect Lluís Domènech i Muntaner.

The exhibition now returns to a place that is symbolically significant to its history in the shape of Montjuïc Mountain and Montjuïc Castle in particular, where thousands of people were detained, as well as torture and executions carried out, during the darkest years of our recent past.