FAS technical director to set up Singapore Coaching School

SINGAPORE — Aspiring football coaches in Singapore will now be able to earn their badges along with a diploma at the soon-to-be-opened Singapore Coaching School.

The school is the brainchild of Football Association of Singapore (FAS) technical director Michel Sablon, who had been tasked to come up with a developmental plan to raise the country’s footballing standards.

Having identified the education of coaches as one of 11 key areas to improve on, Sablon said the school will produce a consistent pipeline of well-qualified and highly skilled coaches for Singapore.

“Our aim is not simply to produce better players, but to create a world-class football development environment to nurture our talents,” explained the 68-year-old Belgian, who is widely recognised as the man who turned Belgium into a football powerhouse.

“This means we will not simply aim to produce better players, but also augment the capabilities of our coaches, sports science and medicine professionals, scouts and more.”

Sablon, along with National Youth Teams head coach Richard Tardy and FAS head of coach education Mohamed Basir, will oversee the courses, which will be conducted by instructors from the Asian Football Confederation (AFC).

The course programme will largely adopt material from a new AFC coaching syllabus, which Sablon is involved in developing. Sablon said the new curriculum will contain “dramatically changed content with more hours, more practical elements and hands-on experiences, and more assessments.”

Participants who successfully complete the syllabus will be awarded official certification that will be the equivalent of the respective AFC B or A licences.

The school aims to begin conducting its B licence equivalent course — which equips coaches with the skills to train Under-15 players — in August. The A licence version, which is focused on the coaching of Under-17 players, is slated to be held at the end of this year.

Apart from the Coaching School, Sablon and his team have also launched the Goalkeeper Academy of Singapore (GAS) for young local keepers aged between 10 and 16. The Academy aims to improve goalkeeping standards by adopting the latest coaching methods.

The weekly GAS sessions are currently conducted by FAS Goalkeeper Coach Frederic De Boever, and have since attracted 70 participants since the start of this year.

Irwan Hamid, whose son Ilhan Faiq is a student at the academy, said he was pleased with what he has seen of the programme so far.

“The training methodology is advanced and I understand that it is similar to the training methods used by teams in Europe,” he said.