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 Sometimes perceptions can be wide of the mark, in which case we should be
reappraising Craig Bellamy. The Wales and West Ham United forward is announcing
plans today to bring a football structure, an education structure and millions
of pounds of investment into Sierra Leone, the war-ravaged West African nation.
The project has been received so positively by the President of Sierra Leone,
Ernest Bai Koroma, that he has gifted a 25-acre site on which to start building
and has instructed his ministers to jump to Bellamy's command.
The Craig Bellamy Foundation will soon start the construction of a football
academy in Freetown, the capital, that Bellamy insists will match standards in
the Barclays Premier League. However, his vision for the country extends way
beyond this nascent, elite residential football school.
At the end of last season, he had the whole of June free and decided he
wanted to see Sierra Leone. Because of the dangers in a country only starting to
recover from more than a decade of civil war, Liverpool, his club at the time,
advised him against going and refused to insure him; nevertheless, he went.
What he found was a country with no football structure whatsoever. The result
is not only this five-star academy, but The Craig Bellamy Foundation League,
which will be up and running in November and will incorporate 14 new leagues and
68 new boys' teams, thus giving employment to 141 managers and coaches.
The initial Foundation costs will be approaching £550,000 a year. Of that,
Bellamy has so far budgeted nearly £650,000 of his own money in the first three
years, but adds that he is in it “until I'm a very old man”.
There is no financial return for him, either. “I'm not looking to find and
sell players,” he said. “I'm not an agent. I want to make it clear that if any
player does make it, any fee goes straight back into the academy.”
Sierra Leone is ranked by Unicef as having the worst child mortality figures
in the world and by the United Nations as having the worst record according to
the Human Development Index, which measures life expectancy, literacy, education
and standard of living. Tom Vernon, Manchester United's chief scout in Africa
and a key partner in the project, says that Bellamy quickly grasped the enormous
difficulties in taking boys to live at the academy.
“This will be such a culture shock for these kids,” he said. “There will be
kids who have never left their village, who have lost family members in the war
and may well have had an older brother who was a child soldier. We'll literally
be starting by teaching them social behaviour you teach a three-year-old.”
But Bellamy's plans do not simply involve the gift of organised football. The
new coaches in his league will be put through adapted versions of the FA's
coaching courses so that in three years, Sierra Leone will have more qualified
coaches than any other West African nation. Likewise, every year, the team
managers, who will have a responsibility for the boys' pastoral care, will go on
week-long residential courses to improve their education.
This will then be passed on to the boys; in the new leagues, teams will
accrue extra league points for fair play, school attendance and community
projects such as unblocking sewers and health education workshops. After games,
every boy will be asked an HIV/Aids or medical question and will boost his
side's goal difference if he answers correctly. The projections are that 81,000
children will soon receive health awareness education through the foundation.
“Because of what's happened over the years with the war,” Bellamy said,
“children haven't had any opportunity, they haven't been thrown a football,
they've been thrown a gun. Now we can give them a chance that their fathers or
grandfathers never had. That's the buzz for me.”
A cynic with only a thin knowledge of Bellamy's sometimes discordant journey
through football might suggest that the buzz is in fact some good PR. But as
Vernon said: “There are a lot cheaper ways of getting good publicity than this.”
And as Bellamy said straight- forwardly: “I've never been interested in
people's comments anyway, apart from my family and my friends.”
He has certainly kept the whole story pretty quiet. It all started when two
of his friends in the timber industry started making business trips there and
telling him about the local popularity of the Premier League.
“I thought, ‘I wouldn't mind going to see that for myself,'” Bellamy said.
“I've always been intrigued by Africa's footballers and that's one continent we
don't really get to see.”
He thus arrived there unannounced for a week last June with little apart from
the large quantity of footballs he had persuaded Nike, his sponsor, to provide.
“I wanted to see the country my own way, without fanfare or publicity,” he said.
“And I made a rule that wherever I saw people playing football, I would stop,
give them a ball and join in. That's where I got the idea for the academy. I
thought, ‘I'm in the middle of nowhere and they're playing with a ball made of
rolled-up socks.' And these boys had ability that I don't see from kids any
more.”
Bellamy returned with his brainchild: the academy. He monitored the Sierra
Leone general election in August and, when that convinced him that the country
was indeed embracing peace, he commissioned Vernon to conduct a feasibility
study.
Vernon, a 30-year-old from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, has been in Ghana
for nearly ten years and started from scratch his own football academy called
Right To Dream, which not only polishes the best young players he can find, but
educates them, too. He has two boys on Fulham's books and a number of others at
university in America.
Vernon's vision is that the boys who do not make it as professional
footballers - who are the vast majority - will leave equipped to make it in life
elsewhere. This is exactly how Bellamy wants it in Sierra Leone.
But Vernon's ten-day study in Sierra Leone threw up more than Bellamy had
expected. Vernon told him that because the country had no football structure
whatsoever at junior level - no matches, no competition - it would be next to
impossible to scout the best players.
“That was when Tom said we needed not only the academy but a league,” Bellamy
said. “My initial thought was that this was too big for me. But then Tom went
through it with me and I saw the impact it would have and I decided: ‘I'm doing
it and I'm going to do it properly.'”
Vernon says he has been “inspired by how quickly Craig understood the
concept”. Bellamy is to visit next month to check on its progress.
The next step? “I've thought about doing it in Cape Verde,” Bellamy said.
“But for now, it's all Sierra Leone. When you see these people, they do have an
effect on you. There is now no other place I'd rather do something like this.”
More information is available on craigbellamyfoundation.org, which is to
be launched today.
Craig
Bellamy invests £650,000 to help tackle plight of war-torn country | Football -
Times Online
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