Still recovering from the trauma of war, a Bosnian town is being helped to rediscover its identity and shape a brighter future thanks to the reintroduction of football.
A spray of bullet holes marks a town centre wall, a graveyard sits precariously atop a hill and a chunk of a bridge bombed by NATO forces lies submerged in the blue waters of the River Drina. Twelve years after the end of the Bosnian conflict, there remains little physical evidence of the horrors that occurred in Foca.
Yet this pretty little town, 70 kilometres south-east of Sarajevo, was ravaged during the war, leaving its people geographically divided and psychologically scarred. The country’s division into the Muslim-Croat Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Serb Republika Srpska has meant youngsters from ethnic groups are now seldom given the opportunity to meet.
The revival of an old tradition could, however, change all that. Featuring an 11-a-side U-17 competition and a two-a-side boy-girl U-l 6 street football event, “Football Friends Foca 07″ brought together a new generation between 11 and 13 May this year. For the first time in more than a decade, Muslim and Serb children ran by the town’s pine trees, along its river banks and up into its forests.
“It all began three years ago. I was born in Foca and before the war I used to watch the big youth tournament here where the different regions would play against each other,” says Zoran Avramovic, President of Belgrade-based foundation Football Friends and director of Red Star Belgrade’s sports marketing agency.

The President of the Malian football association, Salif Keita – the first ever African Footballer of the Year in 1970 and Europe’s second-highest goalscorer in 1967 with 42 goals for St Etienne – learned about the importance of grassroots football during his career in Europe.
In the 1980s he was the association’s national technical director, but left his post due to a lack of support from officials for his youth development project. “I had devised a development plan for Malian football based on training centres similar to those I had seen in operation at Nantes, St Etienne or Benfica, but the board weren’t interested because they were looking for instant results,” says Keita.
In 1994, he founded a football academy named Centre Salif Keita (CSK), which includes a first division football team. The centre has produced players of the calibre of Mahamadou Diarra (Real Madrid) and Seydou Keita (Lens), who was named player of the tournament at the 1999 FIFA World Youth Championship in Nigeria.
Thanks to Keita’s pioneering football academy, Mali’s youth team began to produce good results such as the third place achieved at the World Youth Championship in Nigeria or reaching the quarter-finals of the FIFA U-17 World Championships of 1997 and 2001.
“Mali is one of the few African countries which have developed a genuine grassroots football project. Training is the only route to success and I don’t know of many African associations that have a training programme worthy of its name,” says German coach Joachim Fickert, who has worked for his country’s association and has also been national coach of Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Rwanda and Benin.
In addition to the Centre Salif Keita, there is an organisation named ACEFOOT (Association of Football Training Centres and Schools), which was founded in 2002 and has 56 affiliated centres.
The most promising of the young players to have emerged is Centre Salif Keita’s striker Boubacar Bangoura of Centre Salif Keita, who was included in the African U-18 squad that recently took on their counterparts from Europe in the Meridian Cup.
Some of the members of Mali’s current senior side are products of the training centres and are only young, which means they still have a lot to give over the next three years in their bid to fulfil their country’s dream of qualifying for the 2010 World Cup.
“The problem is that here, just like everywhere else, people want to win and see instant results,” says Salif Keita with trepidation. Which means that the fans first want to see Mali qualify for next year’s African Cup of Nations in Ghana.

Mali certainly have the players and possess a good pool of talent. Perhaps all they need is to take a calmer, more long-term view. Many national head coaches have come and gone over the past ten years: Mamadou Keita, Christian Sarramagna, Romano Matte, Henry Kasperczak, Christian Dalger, Henri Stambouli, Alain Moizan, Mamadou Keita again, Pierre Lechantre and now Jean-Francois Jodar, who is overseeing Mali’s qualifying campaign for ACN 2008 in Ghana.
“What I am most interested in at the moment is training coaches. The next priority is working with young players to improve the quality of Malian football. It’s a long-term job,” says Jodar, who helped France lift the 2001 FIFA U-17 World Championship in Trinidad and Tobago.
Kanoute believes that Mali will begin to make a name for themselves on the international stage any time now. “I think that we are one of the better teams on the African continent, although Cameroon, Cote d’lvoire and Nigeria are ahead of us. All we need is a bit of experience and that will come,” says the Sevilla striker. However, it is not easy to carry out a long-term project when the country demands instant results, particularly after Mali lost out to Togo in their qualifying group for the 2006 FIFA World Cup’” in Germany.
Kanoute, Sissoko, Diarra, Seydou Keita, Djimi Traore and all of Mali have one goal: to book a place at South Africa 2010. The whole country is dreaming of celebrating the 50th anniversary of its independence by debuting at the World Cup.