An innovative football and life-skills coaching programme – Premier Skills – has called half-time in India.

The programme – run by the Premier League and the British Council, with support from the All India Football Federation, ESPN-Start Sports and Nike – concluded its first half in Kolkata in a lively ceremony in March.

Coaching and life skills
The initiative is designed to enhance young people’s football coaching and life skills while improving their English language ability. Piloted in Egypt, the first leg of the Indian programme was held in Delhi from 4 to 9 February in which 40 young football coaches from schools and sports academies in North India took part. The programme then moved on to train an equal number of coaches in the cradle of Indian football, Kolkata, a city where the game enjoys immense popularity, rivalling, and even overshadowing, cricket.

Star Premier League coaches
Two former UK Premier League stars, Warren Barton and Robbie Earle, headed the coaching programme, assisted by certified Football Association coaches, Henry Millington and Billy Stewart in Delhi (pictured) and Vic Bettinelli and Gareth Prosser in Kolkata.

Indranil Chakraborty, one of the young coaches who attended the Kolkata programme, felt transformed at the end of it. He says, ‘It exceeded my expectations as I had initially thought that this would be just another training camp. I was proved wrong. We knew about basic coaching, but after completing Premier Skills we have become better human beings because we learnt about discipline, without which a person or a coach can never get success in life’.

‘The strong element of partnership that was built into the project from the very start set this aside from most other programmes that we do with our young audiences here in India,’ says Sujata Sen, the British Council’s Director in East India and leader of the project.

What's next?
An advanced Premier Skills programme in October 2008 will see the 40 best coaches from the 80 who participated in the first phase.

Following the success of Premier Skills in Egypt and India, the British Council and Premier League are in discussions to  expand the initiative to other countries. As well as providing access to football coaching and training in life skills, the initiative allows participants to support their English language learning online through a dedicated Premier Skills zone.

To find out more about how the British Council is using sport to bring together people from different cultures, visit our sports pages.