At least 80 youth stand a chance to be part of a 10-day residential football development camp at the English club Bolton Wanderers's Reebok stadium, in the next one year.
IT firms St Angelo's and OCE have collaborated to form St Angelo's OCE international football, and have signed a contract with Bolton Wanderers for five years to impart football knowledge.
"At the moment we are talking upto a 100 this year. But they will be in batches of 20. We have about four batches lined up at the moment," Bolton Wanderers' Chairman Philip Gartside said here.
Commenting on the association, St Angelo's study abroad Chairman and Managing director Agnelo Rajesh Athaide said: "We want to create excellent football opportunities for the youngsters, the school children, college kids and the corporates. We have a contract with them, which we will keep on extending. It is for five years at a go."
"We are going to have the talent hunt throughout the country starting tomorrow. Specifically we are going to target Goa, Mumbai, Pune, Kerala, West Bengal, Chennai. These are the six cities we are going to begin with," he added.
Many European clubs are looking at India to have their training camps and Gartside said Bolton Wanderers is different from the others.
"If you look at football now, it's a big commercial world. The bigger teams, and we are not one of them, they are looking at commercial advantage. We are not doing that. What we are trying to do is use football in a much more modest way for education and maybe find a footballer.
"If the student likes the taste of a 10-day programme then it encourages him to do the year long programme. We have a two year programme of international B-tech at level three. The benefit of that is he spends two years training as an athlete as well."
Asked if the club would open a academy here, he said, "It would be an opportunity to do but wouldn't want to do that and dilute the quality. That is the difficulty. You need to do it at the right quality or you are not doing yourselves much favour.
He stressed that India needs to develop the sport at the grassroots level to improve the football in the country.
"If you look at what happened in UK, a lot of investments has gone into the grassroots through the National Game Board. The investment had gone into providing facilities. That is very important," he added.
