A party of 20 veteran footballers from England will visit the Algarve to play a football match to help the Luís Figo Foundation.
The players are friends, mostly in their 40s and 50s, who live in Nottingham and play together in a veterans’ league. The group has played in a number of games in different countries.
Fourteen players visited the Somme region in Northern France in 2006, where they took part in commemorations to mark the 90th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme (1916) during the First World War. They played a team from the village of Les Boefs, 20km from Amiens, during the visit, which included poignant tours of various British war cemeteries and monuments.
In 2007 a large group visited Wroclaw in Poland, where they played against Polish and British members of the city’s university.
Twenty players competed in two games against Belgians, Dutch and French players at Ypres in the Flanders region of Belgium in 2008 and the following year a smaller party played two games in Luca in Northern Italy.
In 2010 the veterans played a team in Vaxholm, an island 15km from the Swedish capital of Stockholm.
The players, known as Hardly Athletic or the Very Old Contemptibles, will arrive in the Algarve on November 28 and stay three nights at the Suites Alba Resort near Carvoeiro, which is co-owned by Figo.
Some of the group have visited the Algarve before and like the friendly people, the climate and the very attractive coastline and towns.
The game will take place on Saturday, December 1 at 3pm at the Lagoa football pitch and it will be against employees of Figo’s various businesses in the region.
Group organiser Martin Cooper said: “We are far from being a good team and there is nothing professional about us. We have lost more games than we have won. We are a bunch of friends who play for fun and enjoy meeting people from different countries, playing football with them and sharing a glass of the local produce. There are hopes that Figo himself might play.
“Eusébio, Figo and Ronaldo would be amazed at our legendary lack of skill, talent and fitness! Our oldest player is 58 and should have retired long ago.
“We have heard of the good work that the Figo Foundation does and thought that it would be ideal, rather than just playing football, to try to help less fortunate people by donating whatever money, no matter how small, that we can.
“We are all very much looking forward to meeting and making friends with our Portuguese hosts and being united in sport.”
