Fair play to him

LostinBlanch

Far from being my favourite player but Craig Bellamy has come up in my estimation.

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.

mike65

Read about this last night on a Liverpool fan site, suddenly everyone loved him!

Quite an undertaking to be sure.

Mike.

IrishMike

Maybe he could set up a golf academy too ......................

Ok ill get my coat

chopperbyrne

Fair play to him.

A very worthy cause.

Mitch Connor

What else can you say then fair play to the lad - a remarkable gesture; i hope it all works out well. I hope more footballers take his example and run with it too.

Mr Alan

afaik when he was at Liverpool he also donated a few weeks wages of his to a lower league club to stop em going into administration. Seems like a nice fella.

Still a ****ing head case though

Charlie

Can't say i'm a fan of the chap because of all the grief he caused at Newcastle, but fair play to him, and what a good example to set for his other pro's with the current climate of the EPL being flooded with cash.

DSB

Yeah thats a lovely thing to do. Fair play.

gucci

IrishMike wrote: »

Maybe he could set up a golf academy too ......................

Ok ill get my coat

if he actually suceeded in de-capitating riise that time this seasons champions league might be a little different. Then again last years one would be different also.

One Cold Hand

Fair play to him, he is obviously trying to do his bit, and it sounds like it will definately be used. However it seems as a Premier League Standard Football Academy is not what the people of Sierra Leone need most. Surely a running water system, or a few schools, or hospitals would be more urgent?

Mitch Connor

my understanding of the scheme is that it would require running water, will provide mediacl and an education to these kids - with football being what brings them together. It might not be EXACTLY what the people need, but Bellamy knows football and it is what he can best help these kids through.

Jazzy

Tauren wrote: »

my understanding of the scheme is that it would require running water, will provide mediacl and an education to these kids - with football being what brings them together. It might not be EXACTLY what the people need, but Bellamy knows football and it is what he can best help these kids through.

exactly, craig bellamy isnt exactly an engineer

I-Bleed-White

While this has certainly changed my opinion of oul Craig because it REALLY is a great thing to do and far more than I have ever accomplished or even tried to accomplish. Does everything have to be called the Craig Bellamy this and the Craig Bellamy that. On a broader point I think true charity (not to take away from the amazing things he is doing) warrents no recognition. Feel free to slate but I have to let that one out.

Mad_Max

Yeah i'd usually agree that charity needs no publicity but in this case I think he is undertaking something more than just "charity". If the costs are initially 550k a year and will most likely rise he will not be able to fund that all himself for a long time and so a bit of publicity will help drum up extra funding for the initiative.

vorbis

In fairness, it sounds like he hasn't been trying to milk the publicity aspect. Its quite normal for the charity foundations to be named after the principal donor (Bill and Melina Gates foundation for example). There probably is a little bit of ego in naming the league after himself but what harm? He is still a headcase but its a great piece of work he's doing for Sierra Leone.

DSB

I-Bleed-White wrote: »

While this has certainly changed my opinion of oul Craig because it REALLY is a great thing to do and far more than I have ever accomplished or even tried to accomplish. Does everything have to be called the Craig Bellamy this and the Craig Bellamy that. On a broader point I think true charity (not to take away from the amazing things he is doing) warrents no recognition. Feel free to slate but I have to let that one out.

I'm sure it wasn't absolutely necessary of him to call it that. But its hardly a big deal either.

LuckyLloyd

I hope he gets the breaks with this in terms of funding and a favorable political climate in the country concerned. How could one view this negatively?

Bubs101

I think Mohommed Kallon did something very similar in Africa a couple of years back. Named the clubs after himself to