Courtesy: Bernama


Ministry To Set Up Football Academy To Train Young Players

YAN, July 5 (Bernama) -- The Youth and Sports Ministry will set up several national football academies to educate and train children in the sport and create quality players for the country, Minister Datuk Ahmad Shabery Cheek said.

He said the ministry's Football Development Committee was now identifying sites for the project, which he said would be modelled after the football academies of European clubs which had successfully created a continuous stream of quality players generations after generations.

"Their players are able to play world-standard football at a young age because of a holistic development programmes.

"In our case, we are still struggling to expose our players at the international level," Ahmad Shabery told reporters after opening the Sungai Daun multipurpose sports arena here.

Ahmad Shabery said the academies would need a large area, consisting of football fields and infrastructure to train children from as young as eight.

"We lack infrastructure to teach football to our children. In fact, none of our existing football facilities for children are of international standard," he said.

Due to this, he said, the government was now focusing its attention on setting up futsal facilities because these infrastructures did not require a huge cost to set up and they also had high durability.

The ministry, he said, would rebrand some 1,200 futsal courts nationwide as the 1Malaysia Futsal Courts to internalise the 1Malaysia concept among youths through sports.

On the suggestion by the Football Association of Malaysia to reintroduce import players to inject vibrancy into the Malaysian League and enhance the quality of Malaysian football, Ahmad Shabery said, teams need to look at their financial position.

"I'm worried that in our eagerness to hire import players, we might face difficulties in paying the salaries of players and end up having to deal with a new problem," he said.

He said that the huge amount of money to pay import players could be utilised for other purposes such as sports development and preparing back-up players.


Posted by Luca Ranocchiari --> luca.ranocchiari@futsalplanet.com