Football and English are two international languages that are understood all over the world.This Premier Skills story can help you with both of these world languages.

It doesn’t matter if you’re a football fanatic or you know nothing about the beautiful game — there will be something interesting here for you.

Do children play a lot of sport in your country? Do you think they play enough or do you think they spend too much time watching TV? What if an organisation helped children to play more of the sports they loved and encouraged them to get fit? This is what’s happening at Stoke City Football Club.

Stoke city and the world of sports

For Stoke City FC, sport isn’t just about football.The club is working hard to get young people involved in other sports too through programmes like Premier League for Sport and through preparation for the Olympic Games.The aim is that children will learn to like sporting activities rather than watching television or playing video games.

What is Premier League for Sport?

Premier League for Sport is a programme to get young people more involved in physical activities and improve their health.At Stoke, children try four different Olympic sports: badminton, table tennis, judo and volleyball.Although these are not usually sports linked with soccer, Stoke City hope that young football fans will want to play them because they are offered by the club.

What else can children do with Stoke City?

Perhaps it’s not surprising to learn that Stoke have community programmes that deliver football training to young people; or that they run soccer clubs for schoolchildren in the holidays; or that they have organised a football tournament for local teams.But it’s interesting that the club also trains young people in other sports like rugby, cricket, hockey and athletics.‘The more people we can get involved in these sports, the more champions we can have,’ says player Carl Dickinson.

What is Stoke’s connection with the Olympics?

Another way that Stoke City is going beyond football is by giving its full support to the 2012 London Olympics.This will be one of the biggest sporting events ever held in the UK with over 14,000 athletes taking part and four billion people around the world watching on TV.So the club has launched a fund to help local athletes with the cost of training for the Olympics.With a ￡20,000 donation, Stoke’s chairman Peter Coates hopes that people can ‘fulfil their dreams of competing at the Games’.

A shared aim

The organisers of the London Olympics aim to connect with 12 million children around the world in the hope that ‘the inspirational power of the Games’ will persuade them to ‘choose sport’.And this is precisely what Stoke City are trying to do by giving young people in the local community the chance to get involved in different sports.

ACTIVITY 1

What do you think?

Do you think sports programmes like Premier League for Sport would work at your local football club? What else could we do to help people play more sport?

Do you watch the Olympic Games? Why / why not?

E-mail us and let us know: premierskills@britishcouncil.org

ACTIVITY 2

Decide if these sentences are true or false.

1 Premier League for Sports trains children to play rugby.

2 Stoke City don’t just teach young people how to play football.

3 Stoke City FC encourages children to play video games and watch TV.

4 The 2012 Olympics could help more people become interested in sport.

5 Stoke City hope to encourage sports men and women of the future.

ACTIVITY 3

Sports words: Can you match these sports?

1 rugby

2 cricket

3 hockey

4 badminton

5 table tennis

6 soccer

7 judo

8 volleyball

a A sport which is also a form of self-defence.

b You play this game with a stick.

c You need a racquet to play.

d You use your hands to hit the ball.

e You need a table and a bat.

f Another name for football.

g You play with a ball shaped like an egg.

h There are 22 players, a bat, ball and wickets.

ACTIVITY 4

Find out more.

There are lots of opportunities to get involved with the London Olympics.Try to find some projects you could participate in.

YOU ARE THE REF by Keith Hackett and Paul Trevillion

You give an indirect free-kick j ust outside the box.A defender stands only two yards away to stop the free-kick being taken quickly.However, the taker sees that the keeper is out of position, so he deliberately plays the ball off the defender’s leg and shoots the rebound into the net.What do you give?