FFSL to set up Campus and Centre of Excellence
The Football Federation of Sri Lanka (FFSL) is intending to create a solid pathway to the young and aspiring football players of the country with a long term vision that ensures a concrete development plan towards producing contenders to its national programme. Among the plans intended, as according to FFSL President Jaswar Umar, the country’s football custodians are drawing blueprints to establish Sri Lanka’s very own ‘Centre of Excellence’ and a ‘Football Campus’.
If plans stay afoot as anticipated, FFSL will put its path on the right direction in imparting the necessary and desired know-hows to Sri Lanka’s next generation of football players, who are expected to be on par with professional players. Currently Sri Lanka’s men’s national team is mostly dominated by professional players based in Europe or other parts of the world, and who are eligible to represent the island nation based on parental roots.
“This is not an easy exercise as said, but we are eager to start our very own Centre of Excellence somewhere middle of this year. It will be a top grade academy, the first and only in Sri Lanka to train top talents. The final result is to make them graduate as professional players,” revealed Umar.
With the Super League domestic competition expected to make its return after a lapse of nearly three seasons, FFSL is presently focused on completing their 2025 international calendar, which also includes the SAFF Cup in June. But Umar stated that Sri Lanka is also focused on the 2027 edition of the regional football competition, with a bigger picture.
“While we are competing in 2025, we are also focusing on the 2027 from now. For that, we are intending to start a nationwide Youth League, for players between the ages of 19 and 21. And we also have plans to create a youth side including potential players for 2027, more or less like a development squad, competing in the Super League as a team. This is just a plan for now, but if it works out the country will benefit,” he added.
The intended Youth League is expected to cover 55 cities of Sri Lanka, with an anticipated number of 15,000 players set to be part of the competition. This, according to Umar, will broaden the talent scouting and trial programme, a player selection policy currently Sri Lanka is following since many years.
“We expect to eliminate the existing trial system, which we had all these days, and we hope to go into competition based selection process. The talents will be shortlisted, put into a provincial national pool, and from the nine provinces, there will be extended and high performance training, before reaching the national setup”.
This is when the intended Centre of Excellence comes in as a vital cog of FFSL’s expected new system of selecting and preparing players with potential. Once the initial plan of creating the Centre of Excellence, FFSL plans to step into its next venture – the Football Campus. FFSL intends to complete the two-step venture, which Umar termed as ‘two commercial based and high profile entities’.
“The Football Campus will cover all football related education, starting with coach education, refereeing education and management. Moving forward, we also intend to add sports journalism, leadership, sports leadership and sports medicine as subjects. We expect to partner with different entities from around the world and provide the local players and stakeholders of football with the proper education, so they can make a career out of it,” Umar stated.
Football education has been identified as one of the key segments to the progress and growth of the sport by the current FFSL administration.
“Football education is key to change the attitude in the way forward. So we are trying to bring everything smoothly to educate the people here, from playing and becoming professionals as well as how to administer the sport. In the future completing leadership and administrative courses might come in a criteria for local football administrators and managers as well”.
After recent meetings with global and regional governing bodies, the present FFSL administration has been virtually driven to step up with the two add-ons, as “Sri Lanka should also run its football both on and off the field at a uniform level as the rest of the world”, according to Umar.