Football: Benfica Lisbon opens its academy in Ivory Coast

Ivory Coast, champion of the 2023 African Cup, continues to reap the benefits of its coronation. Benfica, Portugal's biggest club, has just launched a talent scouting and training academy. That was on June 19, 2024 at the Ivory Hotel, in the presence of the Minister Delegate for Sports, Aji Mitch, and his colleagues from National Education, Professor Mariatou Kone, and Toure Mamadou from Employment, Youth and Civil Service. It is therefore a pleasure for me that Minister Adje Mich, on behalf of Prime Minister Bouguerre Mambe, launched the Benfica Campus Project, an initiative of the President of the Republic implemented by Diomande Lancini, President of the Sportify Campus and the Benfica Ivory Coast Campus, partner of the Portuguese club. According to the Minister Delegate for Sports, the Mimos Cefcom Academy, which produced fragments of Ivorian football at the dawn of the twentieth^H The millennium cannot be part of sustainability. For this reason, the President of the Republic, together with his entire government, with the aim of giving Ivorian youth a new horizon that opens doors to high-level football, has undertaken this initiative to provide the youth with a more promising athlete in the future. Read also: http://Dodgeball/Mondial 2024: The Federation requests support from the supervisory authority

Adje Mich explains that in June 2019, during the official visit of the Portuguese President to Ivory Coast, the two heads of state agreed to launch the Benfica Campus Academy project. “The ceremony that unites us today establishes a training model whose implementation will contribute to the professional integration of Ivorian youth,” he said. Before launching an appeal to young people: “Dear young friends, sports fans, always remember that this project was created for you and for Côte d'Ivoire. The sports policy of the President of the Republic aims to make sport a factor in the well-being of the population, an instrument of professional integration, an instrument of social cohesion, and a vector To create wealth and a tool for the development of our country, concluded Minister Adja Mić.

Benfica Campus will travel across Ivory Coast to select the best footballers between the ages of 14 and 20. Only the top 132 people across the country will be accepted into the first wave. The training will take place at the National Institute of Youth and Sports (Injs) in sports/studies mode. One of the peculiarities of this project is that it plans to direct unsuccessful residents towards alternative sports careers. The Benfica campus was ranked in March 2022 as one of the best training centers in the world by the International Center for Sports Studies.