Ramblers Academy’s top talent matures

Eleven years into its existence, Ramblers Soccer Academy has stepped up its game by, for the first time in the club’s history, promoting the majority of its own players to their first team.

Going by the slogan of “own is best”, 17 players who joined the academy as early as from the under 7 level have come through the ranks to under 17 level and have now been promoted to the first team that will be competing in the NFA Southern Stream First Division Inland competition.

Ramblers will be up against Nampol, Rebels, Eleven Champions, Windhoek United (all from Windhoek), Try Again (Keetmanshoop), Hardap Prison (Mariental), Spoilers (Okahandja) and coastal sides Western Spurs, SFC, Blue Boys and Flamingos.

Founded in 1945, Ramblers Football Club have concentrated and built its football academy to being one of the biggest and most effective in the country. This investment over the last eleven years is paying off now.

Apart from regularly winning competitions from under 7 to U17 levels, several players who had come through the youth ranks at Ramblers made it to the national set-up in recent years.

For example, six of the players in the Brave Warriors team that played a friendly against Botswana recently had links to Ramblers FC.

Ramblers Soccer Academy made up the core of the Black Africa Hopsol team that participated in an international competition during 2018, while an U14 team participated at the Gothia Cup in Sweden the previous year.

Many Ramblers players were also called up to the national youth teams over the past eleven years.

“It is indeed a proud moment for Ramblers to see the majority of our First Division team being made up of young players who came through our academy ranks,” Ramblers chairman Sedrick van Turah said.

Before the 2014 season, Ramblers FC decided to swap its premier league status with the University of Namibia.

The decision was prompted by the fact that it was no longer financially viable to maintain the team in the top league.

While the team was getting a monthly N$45 000 from the league sponsor, it was costing more than double to just pay the allowances to players, while there were additional costs such as maintenance of the stadium and travelling of the team.

Having first set out to produce top talent, Van Turah mentioned that the ultimate mission is to take the team back into the premier league. The youth who were promoted this year and their coach Bennie Haoseb (who also coaches youth teams in the Academy) will form the core of the team.

With the strong academy as its backing and once the club’s finances permit, RFC intends to re-join the elites and challenge for premier league honours as they used to.

Moreover, players will be able to move on to the rest of the world at regular intervals.

In the meantime, Ramblers is ready to unleash its young talent in the SSFD, as well as in the regular cup competitions.