Lagos – Solomon Adesina, the Technical Director, Association of Proprietors of Football Academies of Nigeria (APFAN), on Wednesday stressed the need to produce young players at the grassroots under a unified policy framework.
Adesina told the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Lagos that the association had no fewer than 120 grassroots football academies spread across the country.
He said that discovery of players at the right age and nurturing them through academies would help to curb age cheating in Nigerian football.
“We are in the business of producing young players through organising coaching clinics and football camps in conjunctions with state football associations and the Nigeria Football Federations (NFF).
“We work with all academies because majority of them have the coaching capacity but lack the support to discover players that can fit in fast into the National age grades teams.
“We intend to achieve this by organising several coaching clinics and football competitions yearly to impute the technicalities in discovering players and nurturing them to stardom,’’ Adesina said.
He added that the association had achieved so much over the four years of its existence.
“As a body, we had organised the Olufemi Adebayo Football Championship in honour of the late ex-international.
“We want to drive the passion of grassroots football toward bring out the best in our young players at the right age, and co-opting them promptly into the scheme of things.
“That is why we organise a football championship that involve no fewer than 120 academies which run for two months.
“These young players mainly in the age brackets of 16 and 20 years are given the opportunity to showcase their talents.
“Some of them previously discovered are now in the national U-17 team,’’ he said.
Adesina called on corporate bodies to partner with the association toward securing the future of the youth through football.
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“We will also like to call on sponsors who solely organise youth competitions, such as the Airtel Rising Stars football Academy and others, to key into these development programmes of the association.
“With that, we can have a yearly unified grassroots football competition and camps, where young players can be in a pool.
“The best and talented ones among them, can be identify and nurtured,’’ Adesina said. (NAN)
