Wyn Delano
WMAL.com
LEESBURG, VA — (WMAL) FC Barcelona, one of the most successful soccer franchises in history, is coming to Northern Virginia.
The Evergreen Sportsplex in Leesburg will be holding tryouts for ESCOLA, FC Barcelona’s educational training camp from April 22 through 29. The camp will educate youth soccer players from 6-18 years old and is the first of its kind in the DMV area.
The ESCOLA program, founded in Spain, now has camps in all five continents, with over 32 in the United States alone.
Soccer has struggled to gain popularity in the United States, but still remains the most popular professional sport in the world.
This increased outreach to talent in the United States is consistent with a more aggressive attempt among teams to take advantage of new talent and expand awareness of the sport in areas that have traditionally not had a deep soccer culture.
“Barcelona wants to increase their presence and bring their training methodology to the United States and maybe they were hoping to identify a few future Barcelona players,” says Chris Bourassa, the Managing Director of the Evergreen Sports complex.
He also hopes the camp will “raise the level of soccer in the area” by providing training to both youth and coaches in the DMV.
“[FC Barcelona] looked at a number of locations in the Washington Metropolitan Area – our facility was large enough to handle the kind of programming they wanted here,” he said.
Franc Carbó, director of FCBEscola, stated in a press release “We see a great promise in Loudoun County and Northern Virginia.”
FC Barcelona technical directors will evaluate approximately 2,000 players throughout the week. If they are one of the few hundred selected, students will begin the intensive training program later this year.
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