The Premier League’s leading international grassroots football project Premier Skills, run in partnership with the British Council, launched a new referee development course today.
This ‘Introduction to Refereeing’ course will focus on training 32 new grassroots referees, whose selection has been endorsed by the Football Association of Malaysia (FAM).
The course is taking place from 17 July to the 22 July 2011 at Garden International School and is being led by Keith Hackett, a former international FIFA referee.
The long term aim of the Premier Skills Referee project in Malaysia is to develop a number of new Malaysian referees, with those who show the greatest potential when passing through the programme possibly taking on a role of referee ‘master trainer’ themselves, passing on their knowledge to others and embedding the project in the country long term.
Premier League Referee Ambassador Keith Hackett said that he was looking forward to getting involved in Premier Skills in Malaysia.
“Premier Skills has clearly had a huge impact on football coaching all over the world, developing over 1,000 new coaches in 15 different countries. It is exciting to now be heading up this new referee element to the project.
“Referees are a key part of football at any level it is played. Through Premier Skills we plan to encourage a new generation of referees to get into the game,” he said.
The Premier Skills project is an innovative international project run by the English Premier League and the British Council, using the power of football to build a brighter future for young people around the world.
It combines the Premier League’s proven expertise in delivering community focused football projects with the British Council’s on the ground presence and unrivalled experience of developing and implementing cultural relations programmes worldwide.
Alongside the refereeing component, Premier Skills has already helped develop over 1,000 new community coaches in 17 countries around the world.
Monitoring of the work that these coaches have subsequently gone on to deliver revealed that they have put their newly acquired skills to use with over 300,000 youngsters worldwide.
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