‘MTN Football Scholar will create stars’

MTN

The coordinator of the MTN Football Scholar Season 3, an American soccer trainer and administrator, Tom DeMiao, has said that a crop of new generation of football stars will emerge from the initiative – soccer stars that will efficiently combine football skills with academic work.

He disclosed this at the National Stadium, Lagos during the trials to select young players that will participate in this year’s edition of the programme.

According to DeMiao, the football strategy currently employed all over the world shows that the game is for intelligent people. And with MTN Football Scholar, a crop of young footballers is about to emerge in Nigeria that will set a new benchmark.

“The idea in MTN Football Scholar is to provide footballers something to fall back on after their soccer career. The initiate is giving them options in many ways,” he said.

The Lagos trials brought to an end the nationwide trials which took the MTN Football Scholar technical team to the cities of Port Harcourt, Enugu, Abuja, Benin and Akure. A minimum of 100 students would be selected based on their football skills and educational requirements.

These students will then sit for mock SAT examinations where they will be pruned to 30. The qualified 30 students from the exams will proceed to Academy 1 where they will receive training on football and lessons for the SAT exams.