Right to Dream
More than 3,500 miles and two decades separate where Tom Vernon stands, in his office overlooking the pitch of FC Nordsjaelland’s 10,000-capacity home stadium, and where the idea for his innovative, trend-bucking Right to Dream Academy was conceived.
“Within 20 minutes of getting out of the airport in Accra in 1999,” he says of the moment the notion of creating a football academy to provide hope and opportunity for the young people of Ghana occurred to him. “The boys were so talented but also so magnetic in their personalities and love for life and love for the game. It was a combination of a desire to work with kids like that and then the obvious need for pathways and structure and opportunities that almost exclusively doesn’t exist in African football.”
Fast-forward to the present day, Right to Dream now owns Danish Superliga club Nordsjaelland, has residential boys’ and girls’ academies
