St Patrick’s Athletic owner Garrett Kelleher is “delighted and thrilled” to enter a partnership involving two international sports companies and several 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 in February to conduct trials across 10 cities in three weeks. The hope is that two to four players can be signed on professional contracts and join up with the Inchicore outfit’s under-19 squad.
“We are absolutely delighted and thrilled to be invited to participate in this,” said Kelleher. “A club like St Patrick’s Athletic is perhaps more accessible for young talent coming from Pakistan to play and be nurtured and flourish here in Ireland, with a view to then potentially leading on to further contracts or exposure in the UK or elsewhere for that matter.”
St Pat’s mission to Pakistan, 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 idea is very appealing for lots of reasons but from a football perspective it is a natural [fit] for what we do,” Kelleher continued. “We are in the city centre of Dublin, we have a catchment of 750,000, which coincidentally the Pakistani community is not too far from where our base is in Inchicore.”
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 (GSV). 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 that come to Ireland. The club is believed to be exploring ways of providing educational opportunities for the players who would be expected, according to Kelleher, to be “18 years and older”.
“Pat’s have had a great tradition of inclusivity,” Kerr continued. “In our underage teams at the moment the spread of nationalities of the parents of players is vast and varied, and we are delighted about that.
“We have had so many foreign players who have been successful here and taken into the hearts of the supporters. If some Pakistani players are good enough, I think they will find that is the way in Inchicore. We look forward to giving them the opportunity to develop with the club and with the Pakistani disapora living in the Dublin area.”
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 has developed a variety of social programmes in recent years, and 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.
Preliminary work on the selection of teenage Pakistani talent will be done by three coaches from Belgium and Italy before Kerr’s coaching team oversees the final trials.
The initial agreement is for three years and the intention is to send Irish coaches who will run courses for local coaches at a variety of destinations in the country twice a year.
The Pakistan Football Federation is currently suspended from Fifa, after the global governing body described a “hostile takeover” of the federation’s headquarters last April, and those behind the St Pat’s 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 by GSV as a project ambassador.
“I’m told there are about 220 million people in Pakistan so there is definitely going to be some talented footballers out there,” said Owen. “Hopefully there are some unearthed diamonds in there.”
