A year has passed since Juan Mata helped launch Common Goal, which asks its members to donate 1% of their income to global humanitarian projects. Mats Hummels, Kasper Schmeichel, Giorgio Chiellini, Alex Morgan and Alfie Mawson are among the 94 individuals who have signed up and this summer they have been joined by the first football club to take part.

FC Nordsjaelland gave 1% of their matchday revenue to Common Goal for the first time when they welcomed Northern Irish side Cliftonville to Denmark for a Europa League qualifier a fortnight ago. They will do the same when they host Partizan Belgrade this week in the next round and will continue to give away 1% of the money they make in their stadium at every home game they play this season.

Juan Mata: ‘People underestimate football. It gives hope to so many people’ Read more

FC Nordsjaelland are based in the small town of Farum, 15 miles north of Copenhagen. Their home ground is the intriguingly named Right to Dream Park, which underlines the link between the Danish Superliga club and a football academy in Ghana. This connection is down to Tom Vernon, the club’s English chairman, who set up the Right to Dream academy in Ghana in 1999.

Vernon, once a scout for Manchester United in Africa, led a takeover of FC Nordsjaelland in December 2015 primarily to find a club for the academy’s graduates. Vernon hopes Nordsjaelland will field a team of academy players – from their own youth team in Denmark and the Right to Dream graduates in Ghana – by 2020. When Nordsjaelland sell the academy graduates on to other clubs in Europe or the US, the money generated from their transfer fees is reinvested back into the academy, which also benefits from individual donations and corporate sponsorship. Vernon says any money the club makes goes back into the project.

Having built a turnover of $2m, Right to Dream has become one of the best-funded academies in Africa but this has not always been the case, something Vernon now sees as an advantage. “In the early days we were blessed to have no money, as we would have made irreconcilable mistakes if we had more,” Vernon says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Players from the Right to Dream academy in Ghana. Photograph: Right to Dream

“We saw the mistakes from the likes of Feyenoord, Red Bull and Ajax, who had come into Ghana and basically failed completely with the desire to almost neo-colonially replicate what goes on in Europe at academy level and assume that’s going to catch on in Africa. There were some core reasons why the European concept of an academy failed and we were really lucky to be the small guys who were looking up to see a lot of the expensive mistakes being made, which provided a lot of our education about how you craft an academy that has a real chance of being successful in Africa.”

The Right to Dream academy has produced 34 professional players. A host of youngsters have moved to Manchester City; Abu Danladi was the No1 pick for the MLS Superdraft last year; and they even had a graduate at the World Cup in 2014, when Abdul Majeed Waris represented Ghana in Brazil.

“We are still at the very early stages,” Vernon says. “But some of the stuff we are doing with Common Goal is groundbreaking in the ways we can teach global citizenship, social responsibility, the importance of giving back. I have a core belief that this makes better players. I spent a lot of time looking into purpose-driven athletes, who consistently through history have performed to a higher level.” Vernon cites LeBron James, who has just opened his own school in Ohio, as an example.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Godsway Donyoh graduated from the Right to Dream academy in 2013 and is now playing for FC Nordsjaelland. Photograph: VI-Images/VI-Images via Getty Images

Vernon believes the youngsters at Right to Dream and Nordsjaelland will be better players if they are better people. “Look at most of the academies now,” he says. “We really don’t go far beyond financial and pure football performance, which is isn’t a particularly deep purpose, which is why we see a lot of mental health issues within the game – because young players and retired players are questioning what is the point of all this.”

A story about Harry Kane and Russian history is inspiring schoolkids to read Read more

Every Nordsjaelland academy player is encouraged to have a sense of purpose beyond themselves, right down to the Under-12s, who visit Ghana in the summers to “get a global perspective”. “With Common Goal we are introducing a curriculum where each of our youth teams will select a streetfootballworld project out of the 130 around the world, which they want to raise money for during the year. Then, in the summer, the academy teams will go there, deliver the money, volunteer on the project and play football in that environment rather than at soft, cosy tournaments in Holland or Barcelona.”

Nordsjaelland’s commitment to the Common Goal project does not stop at academy level. The club’s management team have led the way by agreeing to donate 1% of their salaries and a few first-team players have also joined Common Goal. Left-back Mads Mini Pedersen has established his own social enterprise initiative in Ghana, which aims to find sustainable ways of supplying products to mothers, which they can sell at markets to fund their kids’ football ambitions. As Common Goal celebrates its first birthday, Mata will be hoping many more clubs are inspired by FC Nordsjaelland.

• This article is from the author of The Agony and the Ecstasy

• Follow Richard Foster on Twitter