The Healing Game: FC Mother Founder Morad Fareed Is Using Football To Tackle The Maternal Health Crisis

On July 11, 2025, on the eve of the first-ever FIFA Club World Cup final between Chelsea Football Club and Paris Saint-Germain, a group of maternal health experts, entrepreneurs, scientists, investors, and footballers gathered at a modern event space in the heart of Chelsea, New York. The event, pitched as a celebration of mothers, featured panels on motherhood, maternal health science, and sports, featuring speakers like Debbie Phelps, mother of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, and Jennie Joseph, who was declared one of TIME’s “Women of the Year” in 2022 for her work as a midwife.

The organizer of the gathering was FC Mother, a New York-based company whose mission is to turn football clubs around the world into maternal health hubs. When its founder and CEO, Morad Fareed, addressed the crowd, he spoke impromptu. “I was just telling somebody that the topic of maternal health gets intellectualized,” Fareed said. “People think it’s a health thing, or it’s a science thing, or it’s a feel-good thing. It’s none of the above. It’s about unconditional love.”

Fareed is a Palestinian-American entrepreneur with an eclectic background. A former Wall Street investment banker, he left his job at age 23 to join the Palestinian national football team in their failed attempt to qualify for the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany. In 2007, he co-founded Delos, a company that pioneered the concept of the “healthy building” and is a unicorn today, with clients including JP Morgan, Microsoft, Amazon, Goldman Sachs, and the Vatican. Fareed has also won global innovation awards and worked with the likes of Will.i.am, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Bill Clinton.

For the past decade, however, the maternal health crisis has been Fareed’s sole preoccupation. It’s an epidemic that, in the US alone, results in over seven thousand women dying annually from complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Two-thirds of these deaths are considered preventable. Unhealthy pregnancies are also the single largest contributor to disease, with many studies linking them to conditions like cancer, cardiovascular disease, and mental illness later in life.

FC Mother, launched by Fareed in 2023, aims to solve this problem by, as its website puts it, “reimagining football clubs as public health vehicles to revolutionize maternal health.” Through a campaign called Mothers of Football, the company is inviting mothers to contribute their stories to what it is calling the World Cup of Healing Library, which aims to be the largest-ever repository of maternal wisdom and healing interventions, with prominent footballers—and their mothers— leading the charge in developing it.

FC Mother founder Morad Fareed.

Besides securing the backing of football-centered organizations like the Pelé Foundation and the World Football Summit, FC Mother has also partnered with the Sports Doctor Network, a global network of chief medical doctors from the biggest clubs in the world, including Real Madrid, AC Milan, Manchester United, and Arsenal. FC Mother will thus be promoted within the fanbases of each of these clubs, and mothers in each football community will have access to its app that can provide them with assistance on their pregnancy journeys. According to Fareed, FC Mother is pioneering a new category called healing sports (h-sports), which merges health and wellness with sports to solve the largest public health issues. “Maternal health is the most important issue that I know in the world,” Fareed added. “And it’s very fixable.”

Fareed’s first attempt to address this problem, in 2015, was an initiative called Square Roots, which targeted high-risk pregnancies and expectant mothers with no access to healthcare. Square Roots opened maternal care centers in neglected communities and launched research projects with Boston-based Ariadne Labs. However, most of these projects failed. Confounded by the failure, Fareed assembled a team of 12 experts from Harvard Medical School, NASA, Stanford, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation to research the underlying causes of unhealthy pregnancies. The findings, published in a white paper in 2019, were seminal: only 20 percent of pregnancy-related complications and deaths could be attributed to the quality of clinical care; the remaining 80 percent were caused by so-called social determinants of health, like toxic environments or social isolation. The data also indicated that 70 percent of mothers experienced chronic stress during their pregnancies, and 60 percent were unprepared for pregnancy and birth.

“Pregnancy should be the most social and collaborative health experience of all,” Fareed noted. “No mother should go through pregnancy alone and unsupported; yet, we’re seeing that happen all the time. That’s why traditional maternal health efforts focused around hospitals and maternity wards have failed repeatedly—we had been looking for solutions in the wrong place.” But if clinics and hospitals were the wrong place to transform maternal care, a question remained: what was the right place? The aha moment arrived, unexpectedly, in December 2022 as Fareed watched the Morocco football team upset favorites Portugal in the quarter-final of the Qatar World Cup.

“After they won, they brought their mothers on the field, and they started dancing,” Fareed pointed out. “I get goosebumps thinking about that moment. It was a very natural moment. It just cuts out all the middlemen, all the explanations, all of the talking.” He had his answer. That’s why, when he founded FC Mother, Fareed knew that to tackle a crisis caused by social isolation, he was going to have to deploy the world’s largest social phenomenon. Bigger than any religion, with five billion fans, and 4,500 clubs worldwide, he was going to bring the football community together to help mothers.

Over the past seven months, FC Mother has conducted its pilot trials. In the US, it has enrolled more than 210 expectant mothers in Orlando, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego. In Brazil, it is running an even more extensive trial involving 12 cities, under the leadership of Dr. Heloissa Lessa, the country’s most prominent midwife and winner of the 2019 Champions of Human Rights in Childbirth award. Her team set up clinics at the training centers of football clubs like Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro, where pregnant mothers and families met a few times a month and participated in what they called “Healing Circles,” during which they would share their own mothering stories and ask others and midwives present for advice.

A scene from a FC Mother initiative in Brazil.

“Mothers are typically very isolated during their pregnancies, so to hear what other mothers have gone through isn’t just a learning experience, it’s a form of connection,” Dr. Lessa said. “When one woman from our group of expecting mothers listened to the story of another mother who had also experienced two pregnancy losses and went on to have two children, she told us that it gave her comfort, courage, and a sense of connection. Sometimes, knowing you’re not alone is the beginning of an important healing process.”

As part of the program, each participant was also given access to a beta version of the FC Mother app, which includes a library of educational videos as well as a feature called “Ask Mothers Anything,” in which expectant mothers could ask more experienced mothers for advice via chat. The app also gives participants access to a social network that includes not only other mothers in the community, but also family, neighbors, friends, as well as perinatal carers such as midwives, doulas, and communi-ty health workers.

Powering the app is an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm called Coach AI, trained on FC Mother’s growing library of mother stories, as well as world-class public health standards from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston and the midwifery protocols pioneered by Dr. Lessa and the aforementioned Joseph, who spearheaded FC Mother programs in the US.. The AI assigns daily tasks and errands to members of the community to support expectant mothers’ needs, like clinic rides, help with groceries, or crowdfunding baby care items. Completion of tasks not only helps mothers toward healthy pregnancies; it also awards rewards to the community like match tickets, signed gear, and behind-the-scenes club experiences.

The results, so far, have been outstanding. According to FC Mother, 96 percent of mothers felt less anxious or stressed about their pregnancy, 58 percent felt less lonely, and 60 percent indicated that they now felt much better prepared for motherhood. “I’ve been a midwife in the United States since 1989, and one of the most difficult parts of our work is being able to find funding, being able to be recognized even,” Joseph said. “There’s nothing like football to bring support to the family. This is the joy of FC Mother: we’ve created a way for everybody to win.”

And while these numbers are impressive by themselves, FC Mother measures its success by a different metric, the so-called Quality- Adjusted Life Year, or simply Life Year. A Life Year is a standard metric used in public health, equaling one year lived in perfect health. It’s measured via a 36-question survey about various aspects of health—emotional well-being, social support, and physical symptoms—which FC Mother participants answer every month. “This is the gold standard health measure for quality of life,” Fareed explained. “By tracking monthly how different interventions lead to different outcomes, we will be able to create the largest ever dataset on maternal health. Ultimately, FC Mother’s AI will become the most powerful health tool to optimize the well-being and healing of mothers.

FC Mother founder Morad Fareed.

At the New York event in July, Fareed announced that the Brazil trial generated 38 Life Years, which meant that in just three months, participant mothers gained six months of healthy life on average. When running in full, mothers will participate in longer FC Mother programs lasting at least 1,000 days—covering the critical developmental period between pregnancy and the first two years of life. These, they estimate, will add up to ten Life Years for every mother and child. For Fareed, Life Years are not only a measure of health, but also a currency of healing. They are the answer to the profound question: how much does a healthy life cost? To make sense of this number, he reels off a few comparators: a Life Year, according to the US Department of Healthand Human Services, is estimated to have a value of US$140,000 (due to factors like reduced healthcare costs, societal benefit, and increased productivity); in the US, it costs $83,000 to generate a Life Year via healthcare interventions alone. The cost of FC Mother’s preventative approach? $311 per Life Year.

This, then, is the financial calculus that Fareed is using to attract investors to the cause of maternal health. “When Morad first told me about the notion of Life Years and the associated cost, I was blown away,” says Omani Carson, the founder of wealth advisory firm Carson Group. “I’ve been working in impact capital for decades, and the challenge is always deciding what projects to invest in, because most don’t have clear outcomes or metrics. There are hundreds of billions of impact funds just sitting in bank accounts, unused. But with Life Years, FC Mother has created a currency that ties dollars to a very real health outcome. Marry that with the scale of the World Cup, and you have the ability to unlock billions for mothers.”

Carson thus signed a joint venture between its impact capital arm Omya and FC Mother, funding the latter’s programs with $1 million, which represents 3,200 Life Years of perfect health for mothers and their children. That venture also marks the kick-off of what FC Mother is calling The World Cup of Healing, which will see FC Mother programs implemented in FIFA World Cup 2026 host cities like Monterrey and generate over 32,000 Life Years. “This joint venture is more than a deal—it’s the dawn of a new kind of economy where health outcomes have real market value,” Fareed adds. “The first Life Years are funded, the first mothers are thriving, and the match has only just begun.”

Indeed, over the next decade, FC Mother’s roadmap includes similar partnerships for FIFA World Cup tournaments, culminating in the 2034 edition, which is set to be hosted in Saudi Arabia. “By then, we should have reached four hundred clubs around the world, including the MENA region,” Fareed said. “Through their fanbases, we estimate having a total of 13 million mothers as part of FC Mother. That’s roughly 10 percent of new mothers on the planet annually. Through football, we will help generate the largest-ever public health gains on maternal healing.” And given the potential scale of this impact, if you’re wondering what is fueling Fareed’s mission, the answer lies close to home. “I owe my entire life to my mother, Wesam,” he said. “This is my small way of saying thank you to all the mothers in the world.”

About The Author

João Medeiros is a writer and journalist.

Pictured in the lead image is FC Mother founder Morad Fareed.

This article first appeared in the October 2025 issue of Inc. Arabia. To read the full issue online, click here.