Six East Africans were on Thursday, June 16, selected to train at at the Aspire Academy in Qatar. This is the highest number from East Africa ever selected by the AFD scouts.
Three Tanzanian boys and three Ugandans will now join other selected finalists from Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali, Thailand, Paraguay and Vietnam who will head to Aspire Academy in Qatar for a three-week final testing phase where the 18-20 best players will be put on full scholarships to pursue the opportunity of becoming a “Champion in Sport” as well as a “Champion in Life”.
“In the past we have selected three from this region but this time the level of play was very high. We do not reveal the identities of the boys for now until after the last round of selection in Qatar to keep off coaches and agents who target them and lure them from the academy,” said Steve Othoro, Aspire Football Dreams Director in Kenya.
The final round of demonstrations began on Monday at the Kasarani Stadium, Nairobi and drew 13-year old boys from Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda and closed on Thursday.
AFD-scouts and Aspire Academy experts assessed the 50 talented teenagers from the region to determine the most talented. Josep Colomer, the Director of recruiting and scouting and Aspire Academy was impressed with the depth of talent displayed by the boys that impelled the selectors to pick a slightly higher number than usual.
“We have witnessed excellent talent. For me East Africa is one of the biggest football regions. When we started 10 years ago people said why Kenya, Kenya is only known for running. But now they have proved that they have talent in football. Local people need to believe and support that.
“We will keep doing this because it is a good way of giving hope to the children. This is what is missing in Africa and what is needed. Thanks to a programme like the Aspire Football Dream Program players have the motivation to train as they know the scouts will come to see them,” said Colomer who Barcelona’s former youth director.
The 10th annual Aspire Football Dreams (AFD) programme seeks to give young teenagers a chance to showcase their skills and put them on path towards professional football.
The trials were a three-stage selection process. In the first two stages, the registered boys participated in 25minute long, 11-aside games. The best players went on to the second phase, where they took part in another round of 11-aside games under the watch of the international scouts to determine the top players in respective countries.
The program kicked off in 2007 in Africa, and attracted seven countries and about 430,000 young football players were screened. Since then, AFD has continued to grow. In 2008, AFD extended the programme to two other continents (Asia & Latin America) in a bid to support more regions and children. Subsequently, a satellite branch of Aspire Academy was installed in Senegal. From 2007 to 2014 more than 3.5 million kids have been screened in 17 countries with 18–20 scholarships awarded each year. So far the program has also involved over 6,000 volunteers, over 150,000 11vs11 games on more than 800 football grounds.
