Youth challenge series kicks off

Feyenoord Ghana Youth Academy begin their defence of the SuperSport under-15 Youth Challenge with a tough fixture against an equally well-organised Ajax Cape Town at Balfour Park in Johannesburg on Wednesday afternoon.

Both sides have sound youth development structures and the team from Ghana are directly linked with Dutch giants Feyenoord Rotterdam.

The Ghanaians beat Orlando Pirates in the final of the inaugural tournament at Milpark stadium last year and are favourites to win the second edition.

The competition will be stiff this year as the number of teams has doubled from four to eight.

The pay channel, M-Net, will also beam the games across the continent with a comprehensive highlights package to be shown on SuperSport 3's Soccer Africa.

During last year's tournament, SuperSport Feyenoord Youth Academy, Orlando Pirates, Wits University and Feyenoord Ghana participated.

They have been joined this year by Kaizer Chiefs, Belo Horizonte from Brazil, Jomo Cosmos, Ajax and South African Football Association Transnet Sport School of Excellence.

Wits will not take part in this year's festivities.

The competition will start on Wednesday with the energy-sapping round-robin matches that will see each team playing two games per day.

After each team complete seven games of the round robin, the top two teams will battle it out in the finals at Balfour Park next Sunday.

The third-placed and fourth placed teams will also take part in a play-off to determine the bronze medallists.

Tournament director Gianluca Mugnaioni said they were happy with the pace at which the tournament was growing and their aim was to make it the world's biggest club youth competition.

"We will take things easy but with the ambition to grow bigger," said Mugnaioni. "We will definitely have 12 teams next year with an addition of two European teams."

Other games will be played at Rand stadium and Alexandra stadium.