Bolton Wanderers to take 80 Indian youths to train at Reebok stadium

Reebok Stadium

IT firms St. Angelo and OCE have collaborated recently to form St. Angelo’s OCE, which recently signed a 5-year-deal with English club Bolton Wanderers, who will impart knowledge of football in the country.

80 Indian youths will get a chance to train at the Reebok stadium in a 10-day residential football development camp in the next one year.

The Times of India quoted Bolton Wanderers’ Chairman Philip Gartside: “At the moment we are talking up to a 100 this year. But they will be in batches of 20. We have about four batches lined up at the moment.”

Agnelo Rajesh Athaide, managing director of St Angelo said: “We want to create excellent football opportunities for the youngsters, the school children, college kids and the corporates. We have a contract with them, which we will keep on extending. It is for five years at a go.

“We are going to have the talent hunt throughout the country starting tomorrow. Specifically we are going to target Goa, Mumbai, Pune, Kerala, West Bengal, Chennai. These are the six cities we are going to begin with.”

Philip Gartside further added: “If you look at football now, it’s a big commercial world. The bigger teams, and we are not one of them, they are looking at commercial advantage. We are not doing that. What we are trying to do is use football in a much more modest way for education and maybe find a footballer.

“If the student likes the taste of a 10-day programme then it encourages him to do the year long programme. We have a two year programme of international B-tech at level three. The benefit of that is he spends two years training as an athlete as well.”

“If you look at what happened in UK, a lot of investments has gone into the grassroots through the National Game Board. The investment had gone into providing facilities. That is very important.”

Like the others, he too stressed on the fact that in order to achieve something, India needs to improve their grass root level first.