Atletico Madrid, Tata join hands for football academy

NEWDELHI: More than a year after pulling the plug from their partnership with Indian Super League (ISL) franchise ATK, Spanish club Atletico Madrid on Wednesday announced a tie-up with Tata Football Academy (TFA) and Tata Trusts with the aim of supporting their grassroots programs.

As part of the tie-up, Atletico will provide technical support, including a full-time coach, to TFA, which will be renamed as Tata Atletico Football Academia.

The club will also take 20 players in two batches to train in its Madrid academy. “Whenwe open an academy, we always look for different options. We bring our own coaches to use our methodologies here but some kids also go to Spain to train with our coaches. They can’t play official games because of FIFA rules but they will train with our teams,” Atletico CEO Miguel Angel Gil Marin said here on Wednesday.

“We made good progress with Atletico (Kolkata) but our vision in India is to work more in grassroots and use our knowledge to support football in this country,” he added, referring to the threeyear partnership with ATK.

Asked about Atletico’s collaboration with Tata-owned ISL franchise Jamshedpur FC, Marin said, “We are going to try and support them. We collaborated in the summer to a small extent but we didn’t know much about the club then. Now we are involved with them and the idea is to help improve the team in the next winter transfer market and try to do what we did with ATK.”