U Sports announces Season 2 of U Dream Football Program

Mumbai: With U Dream Football's inaugural season kicking off to a good start, the U Sports and TSG 1899 Hoffenheim alliance continues to seek the finest young footballers in the country. U Dream Football today announced the second edition of their scouting-cum-football clinics, which will commence on the 26th October and will continue till 20th December. A team of coaches will travel across 11 cities starting in Pune and finishing in Hyderabad. The other cities they travel to include - Gurgaon, Ahmedabad, Goa, Aizawl, Bengaluru, New Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai.

In the first edition of the U Sports - TSG 1899 Hoffenheim initiative, coaches from the Bundesliga club went across the country to over a 1000 schools in 46 cities, while scouting talent at inter-school tournaments. At the end of the program, 15 boys (aged under 14 years) were selected for the 6-year residential program in Germany to intensively train at the TSG 1899 Hoffenheim academy. The boys currently training at the academy are Pranav Kanse (Kolhapur), Akash Mishra (Lucknow), Pradeep Mannewar (Udaipur), Aniket Varekar (Kolhapur), Shivam Maan (New Delhi), Kumar Rathod (Mumbai), Ayush Adhikari (Noida), Ankit Bhuyan (Bhubaneshwar), Ishant Rana (Mumbai), Raul Lewis (Mumbai), Armaan Kalra (Gurgaon), Delton Colaco, Kimran Fernandes, Wellyster Mendes (Goa), Manish Malyadri Siddha (Pune).

This year, U Dream in an attempt to broaden the scope and nature of the talent hunt, over the next 2 months, U Sports in alliance with TSG 1899 Hoffenheim will conduct clinics in over 100 school across 11 cities in India that will be staffed with coaches from TSG 1899 Hoffenheim. The main purpose of the clinics will be to build a stronger base of candidates for the second edition of the U Dream program while at the same time training coaches who wish to expand their coaching expertise across the country. Post the extensive search across the country, U Sports, hopes to identify a larger batch of students to be shortlisted for the second edition of the training program.

Sharing insights on the second edition of the U Dream Football, Supratik Sen, CEO U Sports said, "After season 1, we've seen interest build up for the programme and seeing a real need for it too, with a lot of schools and parents are reaching out to us directly. With each edition of U Dream Football Programme, our aim is to send not only a larger batch of talented footballers each year, but also to ensure that the level of talent each year is higher. The U Dream Football Clinics will be an opportunity for our scouts to observe talented young footballers for an extended period and in different scenarios, thus making the scouting process more holistic."