Good practice:

Debrecen’s Football University

The project came from the cooperation with University of Debrecen, the Hungarian Football Association and the Olasz Focisuli in Debrecen. One of the aims of the University of Debrecen is to broaden their training spectrum in sport. As a consequence of the development in the last decade means, that sport training courses require interdiscipline knowledge and development. The challenge was how can UD can bring the international programmes, developments to Debrecen to train the coaches and youth. The solution was to establish the Debrecen Football University. The objectives of this training programme comprise connecting Hungarian youth teams to international organizations, cooperating with foreign institutions of higher education on sports-related projects, as well as involving international experience in domestic professional considerations. During the program series, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, German and English professionals, who are carrying out scientific activities in the field of associational and university football, gave over their experiences to Hungarian colleagues to apply them under Hungarian conditions. There was a great need for sharing these themes among university professionals, football coaches in Eastern Hungary, PE teachers, and university students (in sports sciences). During the program, the experts held all day trainings 2-3 times a week. It was theoretical lectures and practical presentations.

The Good Practice was supported in 100% from Social Renewal Operational Programme, titled as ’3rd mission’ Sport and science for society in Eastern Hungary. Grant was about 2 million EUR. It was also needed a dedicated and committed work of the coaches of the University.

Through the Italian Football Scool’s network world class actors came to Debrecen to train trainers and youth. The Hungarian Football Federation was also part of the cooperation, and they gave a permit to make it possible for training courses offered in Debrecen to belong to official MLSZ training programmes for acquiring credit points. The 10 week course was a huge success and more than 4000 participants participated in the programme.

The challenge was how UD can bring good international programmes, developments and first class coaches to Debrecen to train the coaches and youth. Interantional connection of the Italian Football Club was a success farctor.

The main lessons learnt is that there is a huge demand for learning from international experts in order to give opportunity to the youth and coaches to compete abroad and gain knowledge about the state of the art methods in sport. This Good Practice can be adaptad in other European regions easily, becuse the project structure is quite simple, but it has huge effect on local/regioinal sport life.
The key success factors are to find a local organization with wide-range international connection, and bring the most famous coaches, trainers, players to the region to participate in the 10 weeks programme, as well as find out the needs of the youth and coaches. Other succsess factor can be a good marketing campaign.