MUMBAI: Having promoted sports and physical education coaching across India over the years, The Sports Gurukul (TSG) will be launching the TSG Football School in association with Eric Benny Sports Management (EBSM) and Deutsches Football Internat (DFI) Germany.
DFI is a private football academy based near Munich, Germany, which serves as a feeder academy to many of the Bundesliga clubs.
TSG Football School will officially be opened on August 16, TSG co-founder Paresh Kothari told SportzPower.
Since the last 16 years, TSG is renowned for changing 100,000 lives by providing physical education training and sports coaching. Operating in over 40 cities across India, it has been awarded with the best Sports & PE coaching consecutively in the last 4 years at the Annual Education Congress Awards.
Kothari claimed that entering into such a unique partnership for the football school will go beyond the grassroots level. Coaches and talent scouts will get an opportunity to develop their skills at the DFI in Germany. The school is an answer to a perennial question asked by parents – ‘What after my child’s training?’
“The Sports Gurukul now launches a one of a kind opportunity for aspiring footballers and coaches alike to fulfil their potential and become professionals.”
“It has been our continuous endeavor to offer the best grass-root program in sports. Football is one such sport where we are seeing very high interest levels after cricket and hence through this partnership with EBSM and DFI Germany, we want to raise the bar for football coaching across the city,” Kothari said.
Eric Benny of EBSM is a former footballer and manager of the Indian national team who has had long stints of coaching experience in India and Germany, which explains DFI’s involvement in the initiative. Benny’s list of successful wards includes Jerry Lalrinzuala, Anirudh Thapa, Gurpreet Singh Sandhu and Floyd Pinto. He was also responsible for setting up Indian Arrows, the AIFF’s youth team based out of Delhi that competed in the I-League.
Benny boasts of working closely with world-class players in the past such as Robert Pires, Louis Saha and Olivier Kahn. It is this prowess that TSG are keen to tap in to. He opines that beyond the grassroots, domestic opportunities are limited for aspiring footballers in India.
His twin philosophies of ‘Only an Indian will make India proud’ and ‘One is as good as their competitors’ is evidence to the fact that his coaching methods wish to make not just a capable, but an educated group of footballers to bring laurels to the country who understand football as well as life.
He also believes that the foreign coaches’ intelligence must be utilized in such a way that India’s dependence on them gradually decreases and indigenous, professional coaches increase in number, making it as viable a career option for parents to consider for their children as playing on the ground.
“It’s glad that we have joined hands with TSG. They have been doing a great job in sports and physical education. Our objective is very simple as we want to create a pyramid and would work with about 1,000 children as we want to create an opportunity for many children and then work with the best of the best.”
“We have designed special training programs that will help us to empower youth to accelerate their football career. The objective is to provide the best football training and help educate coaches as well as to consult and mentor the youth of the nation,” he said.
Benny understands better than anyone else the limitations of governing bodies but claims that Indian football is on the right track courtesy the efforts put in by the AIFF led by Praful Patel to support the ISL and the organizing of the FIFA Under-17 World Cup last year.
However, he cautions that work needs to be done when it comes to nurturing players to have a life in football should their careers stall as jobs in federations are highly dependent on educational qualifications and personality rather than footballing skills and reputation.
As a result, Benny urges patience and a time period of 4-5 years to see the results of an initial plan.
Jay Shah, also the co-founder of TSG, elaborated on the setup of the TSG Football School. He mentioned that as a part of ‘Mission Mumbai’, the school will initially operate in three centres – Santacruz, Wadala and Chandivali.
Once the final selection and scouting is done, there are plans to hold more training programmes in 15 centres from Colaba in South Mumbai to Kandivali and Malad in the western suburbs within the next 8-12 months.
He announced that an all-inclusive scholarship talent hunt program will be held for the first time, which will help in forming a TSG Elite team that will compete in top-division age-group tournaments and leagues within the country. The Elite teams would be in the categories of U-8 to U-16 for boys and U-10 and U-12 for girls.
Exceptionally talented children might also get the opportunity to live and train in Germany with the DFI for either a summer camp or an extended period of time in order to hone their skills and given chances to compete with international players of the same age group and talent.
Shah stressed on the importance of playing matches as the best method of practice for any growing footballer, which is why kids from the age of 6-16 will get to play 30 matches a year at centres which will be classified as normal and advanced depending on the player’s performance and potential.
Benny and he also spelled out plans to open a full-fledged residential football academy in India within the next 2 years which will not focus just on football, but will also have holistic programmes on fitness, nutrition and the modern demands of the game to prepare children to be legends in this era.
According to Shah, the TSG Football School will also be run by UEFA ‘B’ category sports management professionals, which is a huge honour. He also informed that the school will come out with a special app in partnership with a tech firm within the next 6-9 months and will also raise funds from corporates for its growth across the country.
