Right to Dream
More than 3,500 miles and two decades separate where Tom Vernon stands, in his office overlooking the pitch of FC Nordsjaelland’s 10,000-capacity home stadium, and where the idea for his innovative, trend-bucking Right to Dream Academy was conceived.
“Within 20 minutes of getting out of the airport in Accra in 1999,” he says of the moment the notion of creating a football academy to provide hope and opportunity for the young people of Ghana occurred to him. “The boys were so talented but also so magnetic in their personalities and love for life and love for the game. It was a combination of a desire to work with kids like that and then the obvious need for pathways and
structure and opportunities that almost exclusively doesn’t exist in African football.”
Fast-forward to the present day, Right to Dream now owns Danish Superliga club Nordsjaelland, has residential boys’ and girls’ academies in Ghana and Denmark, and will soon be opening another in Egypt, as well as a professional women’s team based in Cairo. The RTD programme has so far produced more than 60 professional footballers – including Denmark and Sampdoria star Mikkel Damsgaard, and Mohammed Kudus, who joined Ajax in 2019 for €9 million – while also generating scholarships worth a total of around $40 million to US universities for attendees who weren’t able to pursue a career in the game.
All of this represents an incredible journey from the humblest of beginnings. The first Right to Dream trials were attended by 100 local boys. Vernon, a coach and former Africa scout for Manchester United, filled his house with bunk beds and desks for the boys to stay and study with him and his wife. “Three of them ended up playing for Ghana,” he says of that initial intake, “five became pros in Europe and six graduated from Division One universities in America on a full scholarship.”
Vernon admits that, for much of Right to Dream’s existence, he’s had to “hustle” to finance it. He began a football tourism business, funnelling all the profits into the academy, and sought support and partnerships with various clubs. A purpose-built, $2.5m base was opened in 2010, and Vernon believes their eight-pitch site with fully equipped classrooms represents the best academy facility in sub-Saharan Africa. A girls’ programme – the first and only full-time, residential female youth academy on the continent – was founded in 2013.
From 100 attendees at the first trials in 1999, between Ghana, Ivory Coast and Egypt, some 40,000 youngsters will try out for a place in a Right to Dream academy this year. Only 40 will be selected.
“We [first] did it on a community level and produced those results; now we’re admitting kids who will play in the Champions League or attend Stanford [University],” Vernon says. “The number of kids who earn a living through football or gain an education through football is so high, and we’re not even scratching the surface in our numbers.”
Right to Dream’s philosophy is increasingly becoming recognised as an antidote to some of the murkier practices of elite youth football in Europe. Every player taken into the programme at ten years old is guaranteed a six-year scholarship. And from the outset, building character and prioritising education takes precedent over football development.
“That’s what we’re most proud of with Right to Dream,” says Vernon. “Yes, there are some amazing footballers, but there are kids who love football getting to build a life around football. We will not ask you to leave based on your football performance, which, in my opinion, is how every football academy should be mandated to behave.”
Psychologist Pippa Grange, who
worked with the England squad at the 2018 World Cup, has been installed as Right to Dream’s “head of culture”, and the likes of Marcus Rashford, Juan Mata and LeBron James are highlighted as role models for the students. The examples of altruistic athletes are cited in an effort to inspire the youngsters to “find their purpose” and seek fulfilment beyond the confines of the football pitch.
“The driving motivation behind that is happiness,” Vernon explains. “What we see the life philosophy to be is you need to identify and live your purpose. What we want all of our students and our staff coming through our process to do is identify things that are more important to them.”
“It is a project that goes beyond playing games,” Nordsjaelland’s Under-19s coach Kasper Kurland told
“The more the players are engaged outside the pitch then the better players they will become. If it is only football each day then we are missing something.”
“I’m interested in art, so I don’t really spend all my time on football,” added Ghanaian midfielder Abu Francis.
As Right to Dream grew and began to produce high-quality players at an impressive rate, it was determined the natural next step for the programme was to acquire a professional club. They completed the purchase of Danish top-flight side Nordsjaelland in December 2019, inverting the usual dynamic in which an academy is subservient to a senior club side.
Vernon’s motivation for having Right to Dream own the club, which is based 20 minutes north of Copenhagen, was born of a desire to prove to the wider world the viability of their model and to offer a pathway to RTD’s best African talent. He was realistic, also, in recognising how an affiliated professional European club would provide a further revenue stream through the realisation of transfer fees.
“We believe our academy concept is a universal concept,” he says. “What we
The RTD programme has so far produced more than 60 professional footballers – including Denmark and Sampdoria star Mikkel Damsgaard
wanted to say was that this was a concept that was born in Africa, born of African values, which we think has a global relevance. That’s why we take tremendous satisfaction seeing our Danish kids go to Ghana when they’re 12 years old, living in the academy, understanding the richness of Ghanaian culture and what it has to teach them in their lives, and then a few years later seeing it manifested in a kid like Mikkel Damsgaard tearing it up in the Euros, who went through that whole process.
“We wanted to create pathways for our kids – whether they be from Ghana,
Egypt or Denmark – to realise their potential. And from a practical perspective, we know that we won’t change the transfer system and we know we have to pay for what we do, so we wanted to climb the food chain of the transfer system. We thought: ‘Why not, within the system, realise more of that revenue for us to do what we want to do and to sustain our own organisation.’”
In addition to the money-generating sales of the likes of Damsgaard and Kudus, the Nordsjaelland men’s senior team – for whom retired Premier
League stars Michael Essien and Johan Djourou are coaches – finished fifth in the Danish Superliga last season while setting records for the youthfulness of their squad. In October 2020, the CIES Football Observatory ranked Nordsjaelland’s line-up as the youngest among the world’s top 67 divisions. And in April 2021, FCN set an all-time domestic record by fielding a side with an average age of just 20 years and 20 days – 13 of the 16 players in that matchday squad were graduates of Right to Dream academies in either Denmark or Ghana.
Nordsjaelland’s women’s team have been more successful still, earning four consecutive promotions.
In early 2021, The Mansour Group, an Egyptian conglomerate owned by Mohamed Mansour, the seventh-richest person in Africa, invested $120 million for a controlling stake in Right to Dream (Vernon remains CEO and a significant shareholder). The academy is a not-for-dividend enterprise, but this injection of funds means the days of Vernon having to “hustle” to sustain the project are in the past, and he can look ahead and plan to expand into new territories. That begins with the imminent introduction of an academy in Cairo. “We’re recruiting in Egypt at the moment,” Vernon says. “From Ghana’s 25 million population, you have 350 players playing abroad. Egypt is 105 million and you have 35 players playing abroad.
“Pep Guardiola and European tactical development in football has meant players from developing nations can’t adapt to top-level football any more in a way that, when it was less tactical, players used to be able to. It’s now vital that players get a football education from, at the latest, 13 if they’re going to cope in a tactical game in Europe. For us to ensure that world-class football education does exist in countries like Egypt is super exciting, because the potential there is mind-blowing.”
There are indeed exciting times ahead for Right to Dream. Wherever they next set up shop once their Cairo academy is established, Vernon insists that creating opportunities for football’s forgotten youth will remain the core mission.
“We think that what we stand for is maybe being lost sight of in the game,” he says. “We can be a living example of one of the things football could and probably should be about.
“The large revenues we believe we can generate in the next ten or 20 years can be ploughed back into the creation of opportunities for the kids who were excluded from achieving their dreams.”