Rebuilding Local Football Ecosystem following National Team's Poor Results at SEA Games 2023
Ministry of Culture, Community and YouthSpeakers
Summary
This question concerns Member of Parliament Melvin Yong Yik Chye's inquiry on rebuilding the local football ecosystem and scrutinizing the youth talent pipeline following the national team’s poor results at the 32nd SEA Games. Minister for Culture, Community and Youth Edwin Tong Chun Fai responded that the Government remains committed to the “Unleash the Roar!” project, which includes establishing a national framework for talent selection and a dedicated football development centre. Additional measures involve strengthening talent identification capabilities among coaches and scouts while launching the inaugural U-T-R scholarship later this year to support promising student-athletes. These initiatives aim to provide more structured training opportunities and a better competitive environment for players across school and private academies. The Minister emphasized that these long-term efforts require collective action from all stakeholders to systematically uplift the standards of Singapore football.
Transcript
27 Mr Melvin Yong Yik Chye asked the Minister for Culture, Community and Youth following the Singapore national football team’s poor results at the 32nd SEA Games (a) how does the Ministry intend to rebuild our local football ecosystem; and (b) whether the pipeline of our young football talents should be under greater scrutiny.
Mr Edwin Tong Chun Fai: We acknowledge the poor performance of our football team at this year’s Southeast Asian (SEA) Games. Everyone, including the team, is disappointed with the results and agrees that they need to perform better.
The Football Association of Singapore has commissioned a panel to conduct a review of the team’s performance and will share their findings and recommendations soon.
Regardless of our national team’s performance at the recent SEA Games or other competitions, the Government is committed to supporting the “Unleash the Roar!” (UTR!) project and will work hard to uplift the standards of Singapore football. This endeavour will also require a whole-of-society effort and we encourage Singaporeans to support the UTR! project.
However, we should not expect results overnight. This will be a long-term endeavour that will require collective action from many stakeholders. I am pleased to share that there is steady progress on the UTR! project. Earlier this year, we shared with Members of the House on the progress of our School Football Academies (SFAs) and our partnership with Spain’s LaLiga Academy to provide overseas training opportunities. We also set out concrete measures to uplift Singapore football in the longer term.
First is to establish a national framework to systematically select and develop the best players from the broad base of participation that we have from the SFAs, the Singapore Sports School, ActiveSG Football Academy as well as private clubs and academies.
Second is to set up a national football development centre as the main training centre to develop more structured opportunities for training and competition for those who aspire to be selected and represent Singapore in the national teams.
Third is to progressively roll out training on talent identification for coaches and strengthen our scouts’ capabilities in identifying the best of our young footballers.
Fourth is to launch the inaugural UTR! scholarship to provide promising footballers the best environment to train and compete alongside their academic pursuits. The scholarships will be launched later this year.
These are being implemented and we will share more details in the coming months.