Conscient Premier Football League enters its fifth Season

Conscient Football today announced the date for its fifth season of Conscient Premier Football League (CPFL). The only league of its kind in India, The Conscient Football Premier League emphasises importance of fair play and sportsmanship as against competitiveness. It also provides a platform for school children and their parents to come together and participate in a fun filled weekend league as a team. CPFL will be held over weekends at The Heritage School in Rohini and Gurgaon.

Registration for the program will close by end-August and the matches will start from October 7, 2012. Matches will be played over 11 weekends and will focus on imparting values such as fair play, positive attitude, team effort and good mannerisms to the kids through the game.

Last year the program saw participation from school kids across Delhi comprising more than 52 teams. All teams were coached and managed by parents who volunteered and were trained by Conscient Football.

This innovative league has been created using best practices from around the world. The league makes it mandatory for every member of the team to get equal opportunity on the play field and also decides the winner through the number of green cards the team receives instead of their match scores. Teams and individual players receive Green Card on displaying qualities such as fair play and good mannerisms on and off the field.

On announcing the league Anupama Jain, Director at Conscient Football said, "We are happy to witness a phenomenal rise in enthusiasm for football in the country. CPFL has garnered tremendous interest as it is the only platform at such a scale where parents and kids come together and work as a team. The league enables us to nourish talent and create a feeder program for higher level football programs, including FC Barcelona's official football school the FCBEscola that we will be starting later this year."

Conscient Football is one of the largest grassroots development organizations for football in India. Participants can register online through the Conscient Football site www.conscientfootball.in .

FC Barcelona to set-up Official Football School in India

Within two months of announcing its plan to enter India in October 2011, Catalan giants FC Barcelona through the FCBEscola completed the first couple of FCBCamps in December 2011 and January 2012. With the second set of camps already underway, more than a thousand enthusiastic young footballers will have experienced the Barça life. The participants have come from over a 100 schools and from more than 20 cities across the country like Delhi, Bangalore, Kochi, Jaipur, Bhopal, Baroda and Pune to name a few.

Taking forward its commitment, FC Barcelona today announced the setting-up of its official Football School FCBEscola in Delhi-NCR. It is the school model of FC Barcelona, exported internationally with the idea of extending the Barça brand and values to the world. FCBEscola Delhi will be set-up in association with Conscient Football, the only official partner of the club in India. FCBEscola will be operational within 2012 and will have capacity for around 300 players between 6 -14 years of age. This will create a long-term training and development platform for aspiring footballers in India.

Subsequent to Delhi, Barça and Conscient Football plan to expand the various programs into other major Indian cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, Goa, Pune, Ahmedabad to name a few.

Addressing the launch of FCBEscola Delhi in a press conference, Xevi Marce, Director of FCBEscola, said, "This is one of the most ambitious projects for FCBEscola worldwide. We hope to train 10,000 young footballers in coming three years and with FCBEscola we will provide the depth and the quality needed to develop coaches and players from a very young age. We are very excited to be here and to share our vision with Conscient Football."

Xevi Marce introduced Antonio Claveria as the Technical Director for FCBEscola Delhi, who will be stationed here. Since the announcement of FCBEscola plans in October 2011 his team has been preparing him for the role. Antonio Claveria added, "It was a great experience for me to start the Barça India project in December 2011 and now I am thrilled to be the Technical Director of FCBEscola Delhi. I am looking forward to working with talented youngsters on a sustained and regular basis to nurture India's young footballers."

FC Barcelona is globally recognized for its ability to develop players. Eight players in Spain's 2010 FIFA World Cup winning squad were from FCB, and 50% of FCB's current first team are products of its youth system. Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta, Xavi Hernandez, Victor Valdes, Gerald Pique, Carlos Puyol, Cesc Fabregas, Thiago Alcantara, Pedro are some of the top players trained under the Barça philosophy. FCBEscola Delhi will offer world-class training under the same successful methodology.

The school will come up in Delhi-NCR in partnership with Conscient Football, a grassroots football development initiative dedicated to raising the bar of football programming across India. Speaking at the launch, Anupama Jain - Director, Conscient Football, said, "We set out to bring the best to our country and are very proud to launch FCBEscola. With this, we will be able to create a pathway for young footballers to continue their development under the world's most successful training methodology. We believe that this will contribute towards the development of better players and citizens while helping India become a stronger footballing nation."

Also present at the conference were Josep Moratalla, former FC Barcelona player, who played with Diego Maradona and Bernd Schuster; Rajesh Jain, Director Conscient Group, and Tarun Chaudhry, COO Conscient Football.

FC Barcelona Camp comes to Bangalore

After being a huge success in the National Capital Region (New Delhi & Gurgaon), the FCBEscola in association with Conscient Football will start its second round of training camps in India in the Garden City of Bangalore in May 2012. Spanish giants FC Barcelona is one of the major European Football club to provide extensive training at grassroots level in India.

In total 180 participants will be trained at the Bangalore Football Stadium. The camp at Bangalore Football Stadium will be held from May 21 - 25, 2012 with two separate batches of 90 children training in the morning (7.30 to 10.30 am) and afternoon (3.30 to 6,30 pm). This will be a five days intensive coaching camp with 15 hours of training given to each participating child.

The training imparted at this camp will follow the same successful methodology as practiced by the first team of FC Barcelona with the likes of Messi, Iniesta, Xavi, etc. Scientifically developed, the training program is divided into three segments – Introduction, Pre-Training, and Training for children in the age groups of 6 to 17.

The camp will be headed by a coach from FCBEscola and he will be assisted by one more Spanish coach and six coaches from Conscient Football. The participants will be divided in following groups - Under-8, U-10, U-12, U-14 and U-17.

Announcing the Camp in Bangalore, Conscient Football Director Anupama Jain said, "It makes us very proud to extend our camps to Bengaluru. Bengaluru has unmatched passion for football and is precisely the reason why we extended the camps to Bengaluru before any other city. We hope to bring the best training methodologies from the world to India with the help of FCBEscola training camps."

Team India Players visit FC Barcelona Camp in Delhi

Some of India's finest football talents in captain Climax Lawrance, defender Gouramangi Singh, winger Clifford Miranda plus strikers Jeje Lalpekhlua and C.S. Sabeeth yesterday visited the FCBEscola (FC Barcelona football school) training camp at The Heritage School in Gurgaon.

The Indian footballers interacted with the young participants, who got the chance to ask question, take autographs and also played a series of friendly seven a-side matches with the Team India players involving FCBEscola coaches Aleix Gibert Buxeda and Antoni Claveria.

FC Barcelona through FCBEscola in association with Conscient Football is running two training camps in the National-Capital-Region. The first camp was held at The British School, Delhi between December 30, 2011 - January 4, 2012 and the second ongoing camp is being held at The Heritage School, Gurgaon. A total number of 360 children are part of the two camps in the age group Under-8, Under-10, Under-12, Under-14 and Under-17, including 20 girls and 18 children from the economically weaker sections.

Ex-Barcelona player and now coach at FCBEscola Josep 'Pep' Moratalla is leading the training assisted by two Spanish coaches, six coaches from Conscient Football and six assistants.