Right to Dream’s vision helps children reach potential in football and beyond

The Danish Superliga is coming to a thrilling conclusion, with FC Copenhagen and FC Nordsjælland competing to win the league. If Nordsjælland secure the title they will do so as the youngest team competing in Europe’s top divisions. They host Copenhagen on Monday.

My recent obsession with the Superliga began when I started exploring the broader role football can play in society. I wanted to learn from the best and the most purpose-focused organisation in sport, maybe the world, is the Right to Dream group (RTD), which established itself in Ghana in 1999 and bought Nordsjælland in 2015. Most recently it has expanded to Egypt, where it is building an academy, thanks to a partnership with the Mansour family.

The RTD manifesto states that if the conditions for thriving are set correctly and the development of character is prioritised, everyone can strive for excellence, irrespective of their background. Football is the vehicle for the change it wants to see in the world. Its vision dual-tracks educational outcome and football development with genuine parity.

A chance introduction to Tom Vernon, the visionary founder of Right to Dream, brought me and four friends to Ghana last year. More than 20 years earlier a 19-year-old Tom had travelled to Ghana to look for adventure and work as the assistant coach at Hearts of Oak in Ghana’s Premier League. He lived on the fringes of the Nima district of Accra, where he befriended a young footballer with big dreams but no team to play for. Tom and his equally visionary and resilient wife, Helen, were inspired by this young man to start a local team. When they saw that many of the children faced challenges accessing all their needs as student athletes, they opened their home to 16 young men and started to juggle their professional duties with their new, makeshift academy and school.

What is most remarkable is not just the staggering altruism in Tom’s and Helen’s early story but the fact that of those 16 children, five ended up with scholarships to US division-one colleges, six received professional contracts in Europe, two played for Ghana and most remain connected to what became the Right to Dream story. Recent graduates include Mohammed Kudus at Ajax, Kamaldeen Sulemana at Southampton and Kathrine Kühl, one of the most highly rated young female players in the world, who moved to Arsenal in January.

We also had the privilege of spending time in Ghana with Dr Pippa Grange. Pippa left RTD at the end of 2022 but was instrumental in helping Tom articulate a vision for the evolution of their culture to support their ambitious growth plans. Pippa, a world-renowned sports psychologist with decades of experience, is credited with helping Gareth Southgate create a new culture of “psychological safety” in the England men’s team and so it was somewhat surreal as we met in the shade of a 600-year-old baobab tree in 32C weather that Pippa’s opening line was: “Our identities are formed in places, landscapes and histories.”

Her interpretations of biogeography and ecological psychology are important reminders of our place within natural systems. Her teaching stands in opposition to the individualistic and linear narrative of progress we have tended towards in the industrialised world. We discussed how an idea from Charles Darwin of the “tangled bank of life” can be used to think about our place in nature. How recognising and embracing the complexity and messiness of life will help us be more open to the challenges of regeneration and resilience.

With Right to Dream, children get the opportunity to fulfil their educational and sporting potential, regardless of their starting position in life. I chatted with Tom about the challenges of scaling such social mobility across multicultural domains and he is incredibly thoughtful and open to the challenges of their international model.

The foundations are strong. I have never been in an educational institution so full of soul, love and joy. In the outdoor, communal dining room we shared lunch with children, mainly 11-year-olds from Ghana and Ivory Coast, who asked about ourselves and our homes. They had just finished a class on ethics and character before going on to the pitch and demonstrating how the practice and striving for excellence is standard there. Importantly, the boys and girls train together and are indistinguishable in their skills and capabilities.

It is not just the students who are remarkable. I had a standout conversation with one of the most natural teachers I have met. Folayemi Brown is in his early 20s and animated and engrossing as he speaks. Well over 6ft, the former DJ and chef is from south London. “Yemi” is a Uefa-trained coach and an English teacher and he had me spellbound as we chatted about our common love of the work of Yaa Gyasi, Benjamin Zephaniah and Simon Armitage straight off the back of a coaching session. He was one of many brilliant leaders we met over our four days. The polymaths who populate this organisation are the natural teachers for a world of almost infinite complexity.

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The connection to Tom, serendipitous as it was, somehow proves everything Pippa was saying. How meandering, messy and happenstance life can be if you open your mind and heart to it and why I find myself with new friends in Denmark and Africa. Darwin’s tangled bank of life seems congruent, intuitive and entirely obvious. Right to Dream is unique in football and I have never seen an organisation with such purpose and passion at its core: a model that prioritises young people realising their dreams and fulfilling their potential in football or elsewhere.

It seems a long way from the motivations of some agents and the football factories I have come across in the UK, where the game seems to revolve around finance. As we start to explore the full potential of Grimsby Town FC I am convinced that football has the opportunity to be so much more than it is today. Tom and RTD are an inspiration to anyone trying to do things differently and I’ll be hoping their dream of the Superliga title is fulfilled. Either way people will be hearing a lot more about them over the coming years.

Jason Stockwood is the chair of Grimsby Town