Delegate of sports officials from Shanghai dazzled by visit to Aspire academy

Aspire Academy Director General Ivan has hosted a high-level delegation of sports officials from the Chinese municipality of Shanghai.The visitors included the Director General of the Shanghai Administration of Sports, Xu Bin, and the Secretary General of the city’s Football Association, Lin Yi.The party was given a comprehensive tour of Aspire Academy’s world-class facilities by Markus Egger, the Academy’s Director of Sports.They then met with the Director General before going on to hold discussions with Bravo, Jonatan Cabanelas, the Technical Director of the Football Department, and Daniele Bonanno, the Football Performance Co-ordinator.Lin Yi expressed his admiration for Aspire Academy’s facilities and training approach."Aspire Academy is one of the best youth training centres in the world, and even though before we came here, we did a lot of research on the academy, this is a truly amazing place here,” he said.He also highlighted the valuable lessons Shanghai could learn from Aspire's athlete development strategies."More important than the facilities and equipment are the training concepts, the training systems, and the training methods, and I think these are the things that we have a lot to learn about in Shanghai when it comes to youth football training.”"In the future, we would like to bring talented young players here to train, and we would like to offer exchanges with some of the coaches – we can bring some coaches here to learn new techniques, and we can also host coaches from here in Shanghai.”Ivan Bravo emphasised the importance of such collaborations, noting Aspire Academy’s pride in sharing its philosophy with global partners."It's more than important (for the Academy); it is rewarding to have people from Shanghai; they just explained to us that they just won 22 Olympic medals in Paris from athletes under their municipality’s sports administration,” he said."So that they consider that they should come to just see what we're doing at Aspire in Qatar, that they're impressed by our track record, the way we work, what they hear about us, it's just really rewarding.”"We're always open to exchanging ideas as we explain to them what we do, but just as much, we also try to learn what they do."That's the beauty of sports and Aspire, and we are always curious. For us to be connected to Shanghai sports and the Chinese sports ecosystem is fantastic.”"How telling it is that on our 20th anniversary, we're truly really perceived as an academy of sports excellence around the world. So I think the country should be very proud. Our coaches are our teachers and administrators. I think it's just really a tribute to the work that everybody's doing on a daily basis.”"I think that's just another toast to another 20 years ahead.”