A football school in Alicante offers training courses to Chinese children to take advantage of the fever for this sport in the Asian country.
Just like bicycles, footballs are for the summer, when children have long holidays ahead to forget about books and dedicate themselves to their games. This happens everywhere: here, that is in Spain, and in Beijing, where more and more kids are setting aside traditional bicycles to kick a ball around. To make the most, in every sense of the word, of these summer months, a school based in the Valencian Community is already offering young Chinese football enthusiasts a very football-oriented holiday in Spain.
Like summer camps, but with goalposts instead of tents, the Technical Academy of Alicante (Acatec) organizes training and development courses that have been presented these days to more than 250 students from various football schools and colleges in Beijing. «The idea is for them to come to Spain for ten or twelve days in August to participate in training sessions at our facilities in Madrid and Barcelona and, additionally, in some tournament,» Ángel Linares, director of Acatec, explains to ABC at the Luyinyang football school on the outskirts of the Chinese capital.
Since his academy trains about 800 students each year, aged between five and 18, Linares has set out to make a mark in the gigantic Chinese market, where football has recently boomed and become a mandatory subject in schools. To do this, he already has precedents in Russia, where he has attracted 28 students since the fall of 2012, and in Canada, where another group of students has contracted his services since last spring.
To promote his school in China, Ángel Linares emphasizes that «Acatec is an academy for training future footballers.» This is demonstrated by the experience of Andy Escudero, a 16-year-old who has come out of his school and has already been signed by the youth teams of Atlético de Madrid.
In search of a young Chinese talent, both Ángel Linares and his assistant Manuel Espinosa, who was a goalkeeper for Español in the 1980-1983 leagues, have paid special attention to the children who participated in the training sessions organized in Beijing.
In addition to offering the youngsters advanced training courses in Spain, Acatec provides a tourist program for parents who wish to accompany them, in collaboration with the travel agency Lomtour. Lomtour has its central office in the Alicante town of Elche and a branch in the Chinese city of Canton (Guangzhou), in the south of the country. While the kids train in Madrid or Barcelona, their parents can visit monuments, go to museums, shop, or even attend the opening day of the new Spanish League season, which kicks off on the weekend of August 15 and 16, if they make a reservation. Alongside the training courses, which cost between 800 and 1,200 euros for two weeks of full board, parents would pay for the customized tourist package they choose during their stay in Spain.
«If I get good grades in school, I would like to go there to train because we know that Spanish teams, like Real Madrid and Barcelona, are the best,» says Zhu Zicheng, 12, with a smile. In the group of parents and children gathering to take photos and ask for autographs from the Spanish coaches after training, Ma Youli, a Beijing teacher with a football-loving son, is already thinking about traveling to Spain to enjoy a vacation full of sun and football.
Font: abc.es
