The UEFA EURO 2024 Get Trained Save Lives campaign - Promoting public health during mega sport events[1]
Summary
Report of the ERC-UEFA "Get Trained Save Lives" campaign run around EURO 2024: self-directed online training, gamified 45-minute CPR sessions for football professionals, footballer-fronted media, and live gamified CPR booths with real-time feedback in Fan Zones across ten German host cities. By December 2024: 183,887 individuals engaged — 77,387 completed the full online course, 9,100 elite-football personnel trained in person, >40,000 Fan Zone hands-on participants — with 5 million online reach. Gamified sessions scored a median 88/100, comparable to instructor-led training. Concludes the model is replicable at future mega events.
So what
The inversion of the usual event-medicine relationship: instead of the event consuming medical resources, EURO 2024 was used as a public health DELIVERY vehicle — 77k completed CPR courses and 40k hands-on trainees generated as a side effect of a football tournament, with gamified performance matching instructor-led scores. For the resuscitation shelf this is the population-scale upstream complement to venue AED programs (Drezner, Hallstrom, Wassertheil): the bystander who starts CPR at next year's event may have learned it in a Fan Zone. A ready-made model for FIFA 2026 host cities.
Key findings
- ERC-UEFA campaign at EURO 2024: 183,887 engaged, 77,387 full online completions
- 40,000+ hands-on Fan Zone trainees across 10 host cities; 9,100 football professionals
- Gamified CPR median score 88/100 - comparable to instructor-led
- 5M online reach; footballer-fronted media strategy
- Mega event repurposed as public-health delivery vehicle - replicable for FIFA 2026
Read the paper
- Publisher (DOI) ↗may be paywalled
- PubMed ↗abstract · free