UEFA Want Your Skill Submissions; Hideous Prize Awaits.

By: chris | November 19th, 2008

If you haven’t checked out UEFA’s Training Ground in the past, it’s well worth a look now. They take the biggest stars and ask them to give a short tutorial on what they do best so you can realize how goddamn difficult it is when attempting at home. Learning skills like Juan Roman Riquelme’s lethal free kicks*, Andrea Pirlo’s passing, Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s 1v1 abilities and Robinho’s showboating (seriously).

* - Sadly, UEFA missed this glorious opportunity to have Ray Hudson continue his disturbing love affair with all things JRR by commentating. (Starts about 1:15 in.)

Anyway, UEFA’s Training Ground is having a contest for amateurs, looking for the best team skills in the world.

The challenge is simple. All you need is a ball and someone to film your team showing off some magic moments. It is a team challenge because the filming has to feature a minimum of three players. The idea is to demonstrate as many tricks as you can in one minute, timed from when the first player kicks the ball. So long as everything is safe in terms of injury risks, there’s carte blanche to perform as many tricks and skills as you want, using whatever equipment you like. So, if you want to shoot the ball through hoops, juggle the ball while doing a handstand or try the scorpion kick, that is fine. The key is to let your imagination run riot and see if your technique can match it!

So if you play for a team with skillz, why not go for it? And if you do make a submission, we’d love to see it too. Send it to tips[at]theoffside[dot]com and we’ll feature it - somehow, someway.

There are a number of prizes, of course, with the top prize to the best team being quite possibly the ugliest van made in the last 15 years: the Ford Minibus. And it only fits 15, so the subs bench is going to be a bit thin.