Football Cooperative, a Community Based Physical Activity Social Initiative for Men: Protocol Paper for a Pragmatic Feasibility Trial

The case for a focus on men’s health is unequivocal; men, and poorer men in particular, continue to experience an excess burden of ill-health, mortality and premature death and both national and European policy has called for gender competent service provision to address this fundamental inequality in health. While lessons have been learned in recent years with respect to developing gender competency in service provision, there is value in considering how they can be applied to other settings, other sub populations of men and other types of initiatives (beyond the limitations of a structured programme). Such initiatives may appeal beyond the ‘worried well’ to more ‘hard to reach’ (HTR) groups of men who are most in need of such initiatives thereby ensuring that all men are reached in health promotion and preventative efforts. Football Cooperative (FC) is uniquely Irish and is a community-based initiative that provides social ‘pick up football’ games for men aimed at improving their overall health and wellbeing. In a series of papers, we propose to evaluate FC, however, we are not proposing to create something to be trialed but rather to use research to assess the social return on investment (SROI) and health and economic impact of a ‘real world’ organic initiative so that the feasibility for scale up can be determined. If feasible, plans will be put in place to upscale the FC initiative to improve reach (population and geographical access) and equitable access to the games and the games benefits. The purpose of this paper is to detail the protocols used in the evaluation of the FC initiative and by doing so, others engaged in translational research may be supported to ensure that efficacious initiatives translate into practice for the benefit of population health.