English Premier League coaches would soon be seen in the country training their young Indian counterparts as part of a three-year skill-development programme.
Christened the Premier Skills project, it aims to provide opportunity to young coaches to develop their own skills through training provided by world class professional coaches, so as to be able to pass on those skills to others.
Premier Skills would involve four EPL coaches training 80 young football coaches in India over a period of three years, EPL head coach Warren Barton told a media conference in Kolkata.
Forty of the young coaches would be trained at Delhi Public School (R K Puram) in Delhi from February 4-9 and an equal number would get the training at Sports Authority of India, Eastern Centre, here from March 10-15.
The project - a partnership among EPL, All India Football Federation (AIFF) and Indian Football Association (IFA) with support from SAI (Eastern Centre) and DPS (R K Puram) - would see Barton (chief coach) being assisted by Robbie Earl and two other EPL youth coaches.
The selection of the participants would be done jointly by the AIFF, DPS and British Council in Delhi and IFA, SAI (Eastern Centre) and British Council in Kolkata.
"In stage I, we will provide participants with a variety of lectures, in order to create a good awareness of the elements of football coaching such as nutrition and fitness and identifying ethical and cultural dimensions of issues faced by coaches," Barton said.
There were also plans to bring celebrity players and coaches to endorse the programme, which was piloted in Egypt earlier this year.
"In stage II, there will be a four-day revisit programme after seven to eight months which would encourage the better among the stage I participants to sustain their newly acquired skills," said Kate Hodgkinson, media operations coordinator and project manager of Premier Skills.
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