Foreign coaches preparing Nigerian youths for the third edition of the MTN Football Scholar, have given a thumbs-up for the kids currently being screened for the programme. The Programme Coordinator, Tom Demaio, said the youths that made the list this year are very talented.

“This year, we got a lot of good kids and we hope to get a lot of placements for them. We are sacrificing to give them the basic techniques and understanding of different playing formations in order to make a good show before the U.S coaches. But they are very talented individually,” he stated.

He said the boys are smart academically, but added that some have gaps in schooling. “However, we are working with them to overcome that and that is one of the challenges as well,”he noted, adding that the schools and the American Embassy are very much involved in the programme.

“The embassy has seized the opportunity to help Nigerians achieve their dreams, so they are very excited about what we are doing as well,” he said.

The Project Head and Consultants to the programme, Kikelomo Atanda-Owo of Perculiar People Management (PPM), said the foreign coaches are very impressed with the talents they met on ground. “It’s a good thing that most of them are fighting over the kids, so it means that we must have gotten good kids from all the cities that we went to. We went to Enugu, Abuja, Port Harcourt, Akure, Benin and finalised in Lagos,” she added.