FCBESCOLA promises turnaround for Nigerian football

FCBESCOLA Technical
Director, Bernat Villa

To improve the game of soccer and develop the array of talents that abound in Nigeria, Barcelona Football Club, Spain has shown its determination to take football to another level in the continent through its academy -FCBESCOLA.

The academy, located in Lagos, is the first of such in sub-Sahara Africa, to train kids between the ages of six and 18 and local coaches in modern football techniques as obtained in Barcelona.

According to the FCBESCOLA’s Technical Director, Bernat Villa, one of the challenges facing the country’s football despite abundant talents is the method of training, a sharp contrast to what is obtainable in Europe.

“What we would ensure is to introduce our way of training, with the hope that at the end of the year, the kids understand our value, way of training and they can start playing like football stars.

“Football in Africa is about physique and individual qualities. The players here are good and that is what we are going to work on. We are going to imbibe the technical aspect, we will also focus on team work and other basic things that people always ignore for improvement,” he said.

Villa, who disclosed that Nigeria has the capacity to the win the World Cup, if they imbibe the training method of Barcelona by training with the ball, said in the next few years graduates from the academy would form the new crop of players dominating the national team and other big clubs across the world and also the coaches developing good players from the training they would gather.

“We are here to improve Nigerian football, by engaging local coaches so that Nigeria and football in Africa generally can be improved. Maybe in the next 10 years, we can see new national team. The only difference between Nigeria football and Europe is the type of training the players undergo.

“We also want to use our presence here to show our brand across the world. In total, we have 25 academies across the world, we want Nigerians, Africans and other people across the world to follow our team and La Liga like the English Premier League,” he said.

The technical director also disclosed that another benefit to be derived by the country is that the academy would improve the country’s local league, by introducing techniques to develop the country’s football.

“Before coming to the country I learnt that the local league is not the best in Africa. We will work not just to create good players or team, we will also introduce different ways of training and very soon the kids would be sponsored to train with Barcelona’s facility in Spain.”He noted that so far, a total of 1,500 kids have been screened in the two batches held so far, to gain admission into the academy.