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St Patrick’s Athletic have announced details of a partnership involving two international sports companies and a number of Premier League clubs, including Liverpool, which is aimed at developing young footballing talent in Pakistan.
As part of the project four coaches, including former Ireland manager Brian Kerr, will travel to Pakistan at the start of February to conduct trials. The hope is that a small number of players might be signed on professional contracts and join up with the Inchicore outfit’s Under-19 squad over the course of next year.
However the trip, on which Kerr will be joined by long-time friend and associate Johnny McDonnell, as well as the club’s academy director Ger O’Brien and Jamie Moore, a successful coach in the underage set-up, is also seen as the first step towards a bigger prize.
The wider project involves Red Strike, a company headed up by Dubliner Mike Farnan who worked in senior marketing roles at Manchester United and Sunderland among others before establishing a firm that has built and now operates substantial football academies in a number of countries, including Vietnam and Sri Lanka, sometimes in conjunction with the local association.
The other major commercial partner is a company called Global Soccer Ventures. The firm is British based but has extensive contacts in Pakistan with chief executive Zabe Khan having been involved in the establishment of the Premier League there before managing a team to the title.
The firm is, among other things, currently involved in the development of a €10 million stadium in the city of Karachi.
The companies are understood to have involved a number of British clubs including Liverpool, Leicester City and Brentford in the development of a partnership currently being put together with the long term aim being that English clubs would work on a one to one level with Pakistani counterparts.
The hope is that St Patrick’s Athletic might operate across the country and its youth teams might serve as a stepping stone for the most talented young players to a professional career in Ireland then, if they are successful, the higher leagues in England.
The club hopes to develop links with the substantial Pakistani community in west Dublin and the wider city who, it is hoped would be involved in hosting players who come to Ireland and the club is believed to be exploring ways of providing educational opportunities to the players who would be expected to be in their very late teens.
The initiative is said to have the support of the Pakistani government at a high level and Government officials here have been made aware of it.
The Dublin club, which is owned by businessman Garrett Kelleher and which has developed a variety of social programmes in recent years, appears to see the project as a mix of social and financial with the successful long-term development of players clearly offering the potential for significant rewards as well the prospect of developing its supporter base.
The hope is that the trip by Kerr and the other coaches next month might yield two to four signings to get things up and running. Preliminary work on selection will be done by three coaches from Belgium and Italy across six Pakistani sides with links to the two firms and the Dubliners will then oversee finals trials.
The initial agreement is for three years and the intention is to send Irish coaches who will run courses for local coaches to a variety of destinations in the country twice a year, and if successful it is hoped to very significantly extend the network over the longer term.
The Pakistani national association is currently suspended from Fifa and those behind the project hope that it will be readmitted, but the scheme is unaffected by the country’s wider football politics.
Former Liverpool and England striker Michael Owen was also unveiled on Thursday by Global Soccer Ventures as project ambassador.