The Backroom Staff - Founder: Luis Coll Jauregui

Founder: Luis Coll Jauregui

Building a sustainable club

The 21st century has seen several elite football academies emerge across Africa. ASEC Mimosas in Ivory Coast, Right to Dream in Ghana, Génération Foot in Senegal - these are legendary environments that have shaped dozens of world class players. Many have tried to replicate them and failed. LAMSA is attempting to be the next name in this list - but with their own approach.

Luis Coll Jauregui and his co-founder Max didn't set out to build a football academy. They arrived in Ghana at 22 with a plan to volunteer as coaches, and ended up, by accident, at the former Liberian refugee camp in Buduburam. Four years later, LAMSA is the first football academy established in a former refugee camp in Africa, with over 120 players, partnerships with FC Barcelona, Atlético Madrid and Puma, and a holistic model that treats education, nutrition and community integration as seriously as football development.

In this interview, Luis talks about how that accidental arrival became a serious project, what sustainable growth looks like for a new academy, and his ambitions to make LAMSA one of the leading academies in West Africa.

The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for grammar and clarity. 

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[ Background ]

I'm 26 years old, from Barcelona, Spain. I studied business in Barcelona and just after finishing my degree, I decided to go to Ghana to volunteer as a football coach. At that time, my plan wasn’t anything to do with LAMSA.

Last minute, one of my best friends, Max (who’s now my co-founder with LAMSA), joined the trip. We were meant to go to an NGO but when we arrived at the airport, nobody was there to pick us up. It’s a bit of a long and crazy story but basically, by mistake, we ended up in the entrance of the Liberian refugee camp in Ghana, Buduburam. We had no idea what we were doing there, a guy who seemed to be faking the identity of the original NGO - which turned out to be real, but that’s another story - brought us there and long story short, we decided to stay there with this potential scammer for one month.

For a bit of context, 20-30 years ago, there were two civil wars in a row in Liberia and many people fled to Ghana - one of the most democratic and safe countries in West Africa - and at the time, Ivory Coast was also involved in a civil war, so people couldn’t stay there. If you want to imagine this place, it’s like a typical Brazilian favela but instead of a mountain, it’s in a plains area - a refugee camp. Max and I were training the kids every day, just organizing sessions and some tournaments with no intention whatsoever of doing anything like what we’ve done until now.

The experience was honestly so amazing, both on a personal side and professionally. Of course, there was a lot of poverty but the passion for football and the talent was obvious. After the month, we went back to Spain but kept thinking, perhaps we can actually try and help in this community.

[ Starting LAMSA ]

As I said, the passion for football over there is incredible. It's the easiest way to get people involved in something and got us a good reception from the community. Max and I were always involved in football but more as spectators and amateurs, so it was actually people from the community who started saying ‘Luis and Max Soccer Academy’ (LAMSA), just as a joke. Well, these guys accidentally planted the seed in our heads that perhaps we can do something.

There's a lot of talent, and of course I will tell you we have very good players, but for example, Alphonso Davies, the Bayern Munich left back, was born in this community. He’s a great example of one of the few kids who got the opportunity to go to Canada and the rest is history. That’s a clear example that talent is universal, but opportunity is not.

It was all very gradual. LAMSA wasn't meant to be what it is today when we started this project. At the beginning, we only wanted to see if we could help these people through football.

Back in Spain, I started working as a financial consultant in a Big 4 for a year and a half and then jumped to a VC. During that time, the project evolved a lot and now I've been working full-time on LAMSA for about a year.

We started from zero. No partners, no connections, no nothing. Now, 4 years later, LAMSA is the first football academy in a former refugee camp in Africa. Our mission is to ensure opportunities to our more than 120 players, both on and off the field, which means that besides all the football development that you can imagine from any academy in the world, we also provide our players with access to education, nutrition, health, and accommodation for the ones that are most in need.

And that's our philosophy - the goal is to give talented players the opportunity to be football players but obviously, even being optimistic, only the 1% will make it as professionals, so what happens to the rest? We have to provide them with the tools to have a proper, dignified development throughout their childhood and early career. To provide them opportunities in education, for example.

The most straightforward example is through sports scholarships. It's crazy to imagine a kid born here having the opportunity to study in a US university on a scholarship. These kids, even if they don’t make it in football, they will be successful in other areas and they will come back to the community and help the next generation. I believe that is the most organic way to change something in a natural, long-term and sustainable way.

[ Once you settled on the idea to establish an academy, how did you get started - what do the steps from idea to where you are now look like? ]

When we came back, we opened a website and an Instagram account and just started trying to get some donations from friends and family to send there and perhaps start buying football boots, football gear, a bit of food for matches, or provide one or two scholarships.

We also started, very gradually, to start building systems and finding a team based in Ghana that could actually lead the operations of LAMSA on a daily basis. It hasn’t been easy but having a trustworthy and capable team is the most important thing about running a project like this.

We registered LAMSA as an NGO here in Spain and two years later, we also registered LAMSA in Ghana as a football club where we are part of the GFA (Ghana FA) and our three male teams compete in the maximum division of the region.

It’s hard to explain but everything has happened very organically in the sense that every next step made sense after doing the step before. We started to get more confidence, more finances, more interested people and you can see, if you keep knocking on the door of certain institutions, the doors start to open a little more often. There's also kind of a snowball effect, the more things you do, the more opportunities come, and now, we are having conversations with people and organizations that one year ago or 6 months ago, wasn't even possible. That gives us motivation to keep this project growing.

We had to focus a lot on building trust from the people around us. Honestly, it’s very common to see two white friends that have a genuine experience in Africa, it changes their mindset and they come back and think, maybe not that they’re going to save the world, but they are very excited to start a project and then in two, three months, they lose interest because they’re back in their reality. That’s something we wanted to avoid from the beginning. We knew if we try to start this project, we have to go all in. At that time, we were 22 years old. I think a lot of people see, ‘oh, cute what these two kids are trying but how serious are they?’ The thing about seriousness is the only way to demonstrate it is through time.

Now we’re four years in and people see that we are serious about this project. We’ve done interesting things already and we have an ambitious roadmap to follow, so people are starting to take us seriously.

[ You mentioned the idea for an academy came, at least in part, from the community - was everyone supportive from the beginning or did/do you have to ‘win people over’? ]

Both.

From the kids and their families, there is support and that's really cool, because if we have 120 kids, it means that there are at least 500 people in the community that know about LAMSA directly, because their kid or their brother is playing there.

Then there are the institutions inside the community, which means talking to the chiefs and all these people and that can be very tricky, but it’s also very fun and very different to any type of meeting that perhaps we have here in Europe. You have to learn how to speak their language and what they’re interested in, what they want to hear, how you have to approach them and you have to follow some protocols of respect. If you don’t learn these things, these guys don’t respect you, or, at least, they’re not interested in hearing from you. That’s been an interesting learning curve for us.

Something we see from other football academies or other Europeans that go to Africa to do stuff is they often don’t integrate with the community very well. We think it’s super important to build these connections because we are operating there and we need these people by our side.

We started running some business over there that have nothing to do with football and that has become part of our ‘business model thesis’. For example, we have a tro tro, which is a van that allows us to generate income on weekdays and also to save money on transportation costs for away matches on weekends. We also have a community game center. We also collaborate through our volunteer programs, with a school, with a medical center, with a disability center.

So, people are seeing, okay, these guys are running their football academy, they’re supporting the kids but they are also doing some stuff for the community. These are ways to get other people in the community on our side and share our mission through different channels.

That’s been super interesting because we didn’t start with this mindset. We started with the thought, we have to generate revenue streams - but we've seen these benefits that we didn't expect and we realized how important it was to get different profiles from the community that have nothing to do with your project, at least directly, to know what LAMSA is and to support and speak well about LAMSA because at the end of the day, these are the people who are living here, you need them on your side.

[ How do you split your time between Barcelona and Ghana? ]

I've been full-time in LAMSA for one year now and in that time I’ve spent about 4 months in Ghana. Once we get important funding to start building a sports center, the plan is to move there permanently.

My role, and Max’s role, doesn’t need us to be on the ground 24/7 besides some legal stuff like signing documents. My role at the moment is a lot around raising funding but we have a team that is executing on the ground.

Of course, building a sports center is going to be a titanic effort from all of us. I have obviously never built a sports center before and I’m going to make a lot of errors but I’m sure I will make fewer if I’m on the ground and I understand how everything works there.

There’s also a more intrinsic side to being on the ground that perhaps you don’t see how useful it is on a daily basis. It’s about building relationships and understanding how Ghana works. Businesses and deals are run by relationships - like, you and I, we haven’t met in person but maybe we are able to do a partnership, in Ghana, you have to go there, meet them, meet their family, they have to see that you’re serious, on the ground and showing up.

[ You’re fundraising in a very ‘startup’ way (e.g. funding for equity), I feel like this model is not overly common in football? ]

Perhaps because I come from a venture studio, and I was used to seeing those types of presentations and pitches to the startups we were funding. But I believe it’s an interesting way for us because it’s not only about getting the money. Obviously, it’s very important but it’s more about getting the money from the right partner. Partners that will be able to open certain doors that we haven’t yet been able to.

Of course there are other ways to get money, there are grants, you can get a loan, all this - and we expect to combine it - but a lot of this becomes easier once you have a private investor that has already put some money into the project.

But, fundraising is not something we are obsessed with. Today, we are running without any type of investor, we are 100% bootstrapped and the academy is growing by itself organically. That’s already something to be proud of - and you see many startups without any revenue or milestones asking for money to help them get there. That’s not our situation.

So, it’s all about finding the right partner. And this industry, football in Africa is a little niche, yes there is money but at the same time, there are not so many people - it’s not like raising money for an AI startup in the US! We’ve received some offers, important offers of six-figures, but they didn’t meet our requirements or were asking us to cross certain red lines. But for us, it’s a good signal to see people are willing to put money into the project, perhaps not yet at the conditions we want but we’re not in a hurry and I think that gives us the freedom to choose, when we are ready, the right partner. And as we wait, we keep growing which puts us in a better position all the time.

[ You’ve set up a lot of impressive looking partnerships, how have you managed this and what are some of the benefits? ]

When we started this project, we were very clear about wanting to differentiate from the typical social project of ‘give us money to save lives’. We do not want to give a sense of sadness to people but actually build a brand that can give value to the people that decide to join our journey. Rather than a relationship based on donations and generating that sense of dependency on your partners or donors, we want to build relationships as equals, one to one, where if you partner with LAMSA, you will also benefit. Through exposure or opportunities for players in your club or workers in your company, or anything - but how can we actually add value to the people that join us?

I think this is the most sustainable way to build long-lasting relationships in business. Because otherwise, the day that they have some financial constraints or another project comes in, they will easily change if they don't see real value in you.

We’ve partnered with many companies and different agents, both in football and outside the football industry. You can see them all on our website but to run through a few of the ones that resonate most with the public are our partnerships with Puma, with Atlético Madrid and with FC Barcelona. Soon we will announce partnerships with Espanyol and La Liga as well.

Every partnership is a unique story, and we’ve made a lot of learnings. A lot of football partners give us football materials, that’s the most important thing. Puma gives us boots, balls and sportswear. Barcelona and Atlético give us jerseys and sportswear but also signed shirts by first team players.

Recently La Liga has run a girls’ competition in Accra and LAMSA took part, two of our girls’ teams have been able to play in competitive games in a competition hosted and funded by La Liga. We are even starting a collaboration with a lifestyle brand, a fashion brand, where we will launch a ‘drop’ about LAMSA.

Something very important for us is that we are running a football academy in Ghana, and less than 10% of our funding is going to football. And that's super interesting and surprising but because we have these top partners, we have to spend very little on sportswear and equipment. We also have some partners that give us cash, but our aim is to build a football brand. A global brand that goes beyond football and can unlock synergies when it comes to lifestyle, tourism, education and social impact. And when you open a project like this, the opportunities are infinite.

Something else I want to highlight about our partnerships is that companies are run by humans. So, it all comes down to relationships and by using your network and amplifying your network. Sending a cold email, most of the time, doesn't work but if you can get someone to introduce you, you’re much more likely to connect. We want to get people to get to know LAMSA in different ways.

What’s worked very well are the volunteer programs we run. We’ve hosted more than 70 international volunteers. Something that we were not expecting about this is that people, when they come, they experience LAMSA, and when they leave, they become LAMSA ambassadors. They go back home and obviously, they talk about their trip to their friends and family. And maybe they know someone who knows someone - you don’t have to be rich or from an elite society, everybody knows somebody. So, bringing 70 people to Ghana has led to so many connections and opportunities - many of these opportunities we’ve mentioned have come through our volunteers.

The more people we connect with and the more people who see and interact with LAMSA, the more we are validating our project and giving us that legitimacy for when we should up in the meeting, we don’t have to prove ourselves in the same way because a trustworthy person has already told them that the project is real, I’ve been there and they are doing something good.

[ How is your relationship with other clubs and academies in Ghana? ]

We have good relationships with the clubs in our region. With the clubs in our community, honestly, the relationships are not that great because many of their players have gone to our club. Of course, if we give our players FC Barcelona shirts, food, access to education, etc it’s clear many players will want to come to our club but I understand that the existing clubs are a bit reluctant to welcome us. That’s part of the integration with the community that we were talking about before.

We have a good relationship with WAFA and their managing director Jan Gösgens. And we also have a good relationship with the GFA, they support us - not financially in any way but when we’ve had some problems with paperwork or the TMS (the transfer software all the academies have), they help us and there is a mutually respectful relationship.

So, we don’t have any big problems with any academies and we always try to be supportive and also to share some of our opportunities with others. Now, through a consulting agency, we are going to run a 6-week course for our coaches about skills beyond the pitch - things like leadership methodology and strategy of a football club. This is something we are going to share with the coaches from our league, they can join for free, it doesn’t cost anything extra for us to invite them.

We try to do these things as much as possible to have a good relationship with them, because many times - and I understand it - these teams that have been in the region for a long time, they are friends, the chairmen are friends and then they see two white guys coming with Barcelona and Atlético stuff and see it as a threat. I understand this and it is what it is.

[ What do some of the future goals and next steps for LAMSA look like? ]

Our vision is to become one of the leading football academies in West Africa. In order to do that, we have to have the best infrastructure possible. That's why we are looking for funding to build a state-of-the-art sports center and facility with space for up to 80 residents and both turf and natural grass fields. Potentially a school as well.

From there, we will be better able to recruit and host all the best talent, not only in Ghana but from Nigeria, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Liberia and so on.

We’re planning - maybe more in 5-6 years - to open another academy with the same methodology under the same brand in Liberia. Maybe, in the future, we’d like to scale this brand and this project and open more academies across West Africa, or perhaps other regions in Africa - let’s see!

At the moment, we are focused on starting this football hub here in Ghana and giving our players the best tools possible to increase their odds of being professional football players.

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