Two football legends assist KMA to unearth talents

The Kumasi Metropolitan Assembly (KMA) has drafted two Ghanaian football legends into its Youth and Sports Development sub-Committee to help in reviving colts and community football.

The bringing on board of the duo - Opoku Nti and Opoku Afriyie, who all featured for the senior national team, the Black Stars and two-time African Champions, Asante Kotoko S/C, is seen as a major step to transforming juvenile football.

Kumasi, the nation’s one-time hotbed of juvenile football, has become a pale shadow of itself, and the combination of many factors, including the encroachment on community parks, lack of sponsorship and incentive packages for young footballers, as well as poor management and administrative structures are responsible for this development.

“The Assembly believes that football is also one arena which could be used to generate employment for the youth.

It is against this backdrop that our sub-Committee has found it necessary to engage the two football icons in order to identify potential talents for the benefit of the nation”, Mr Osei Assibey-Antwi, the Metropolitan Chief Executive (MCE), told the media at a press soiree at the Rattray Park, Kumasi.

He said the Committee which was the first of its kind to be constituted by any decentralized assembly in the country had generally been tasked with seeking for sponsorship for the Assembly to execute its sports-related programmes and projects.

The programmes, he said, encompassed football, athletics and boxing, adding that the Assembly was building the requisite linkages with stakeholders for the provision of kits to juvenile sporting teams in the metropolis.

It is expected to work assiduously in creating more community parks, thereby encourage the youth to patronize sporting activities of their choice for their own development.

Mr Assibey-Antwi said a 22-man contingent would soon be arriving in the country to partner the KMA to develop soft games.

Whilst in the country, the United States (US) contingent would organize a clinic to upgrade the skills of 100 Ghanaian instructors in soft games.

The MCE said soft games presented lot of opportunities for the youth to harness their talents via online, adding that this partnership was a key to revolutionizing sports in the country.