Most people agree that the football project in Almuñécar involving the FC Malaga City Football Academy and the related first team CD Almuñécar City is a welcome addition to the town.

Well over a hundred young men and women, mostly in their teens or very early 20s, from all over the world staying in local hotels, eating locally and of course, then spreading the word about our beautiful Costa Tropical to their families back home is a bonus for the municipality.

The town has seen visits from many parents, travelling from as far afield as the United States and Australia, again, staying locally, just to spend a few weeks watching their children play and aspire to be a professional footballers.

Well, they’ve hit a snag. They are unable to get into the municipal stadium or the training ground at Rio Verde. Despite some local reports that the Town Hall are making it too difficult, George Jermy, the founder of the project, says that this is not actually the case, “the council has really been trying to help us, we’ve filled in mountains of paperwork to make this happen, but it turns out that the grounds need ‘revising’ before we can enter.”

What revising means… we have no idea, especially as the Rio Verde ground was quite recently re-surfaced.

Anyway, I’ve seen the piles of paperwork already completed and both sides are working hard to resolve the matter, which we at the Gazette pray they do. The town can ill afford to lose such a wonderful project which does nothing more than promote the young men and women taking part as well as, literally, putting Almuñécar on a world stage.

(News: Almunecar, Costa Tropical, Granada, Andalucia)