Craig Bellamy

Ask people to name their top five most controversial footballers in Britain, and many will include Craig Bellamy in that list.Fiery commitment, on and off-field altercations and a burning desire to win which sometimes spills over are characteristics which have followed the Welshman throughout his career.

Yet there are few in the game who are as socially and politically aware as Bellamy – or who are prepared to put their money on the line in an attempt to create good in the world. A player who Sir Bobby Robson once dubbed “The gobbiest footballer I have ever met”, a player who has been involved in bust-ups with teammates and members of the public alike.

And a player who by the time he hangs up his boots will have ploughed well over £1m of his own money into brightening the lives of the poverty stricken youngsters in Sierra Leone. In 2008, Bellamy founded Sierra Leone’s first professional football academy and a unique nationwide youth development league to empower a new generation of talent to change their own and their communities lives for the better.

The Craig Bellamy Foundation now boasts a network of nationwide football development leagues with over 1,600 registered members, aged 10-14. It now includes girls teams in its ranks, and it will strive to offer equal opportunities for boys and girls to participate. Alongside the league, a state-of-the-art football academy designed to offer the best in coaching and education was opened in June 2010 and is now changing the lives of its first generation of recruits.

Unlike some African equivalents, this project, also supported by Unicef, is not primarily about producing footballers for European clubs. It aims, instead, to ensure that children brought up in the aftermath of a savage civil war, in a country boasting the world's highest youth mortality rate, receive a proper education, become involved in their communities and absorb the foundation's insistent messages on sexual health and the perils of HIV/Aids.

As a result, truancy rates have plummeted. Boys – some of whose elder brothers served as child soldiers – are barred from matches if they skip school. They are also banned from playing unless they have helped in community projects such as repairing wells and clearing vegetation likely to attract mosquitos. So far, Bellamy has invested £500,000 of his own cash and pledged a further £800,000, making it clear he is in it "until I'm a very old man".

A chance visit in 2007 set the wheels in motion for the amazing Foundation that exists today, with Bellamy believing the project could offer hope to communities, best know for it’s blood diaminds and nine year civil war which left a trail of devastation and poverty.

He dragged in the services of Tom Vernon, who had founded the successful Right to Dream academy in Ghana, to help fulfil his vision and today the Foundation is flourishing. Vernon said: “Even Craig was daunted by the scale of the project he was taking on “Sierra Leone is probably the most beautiful country in Africa, but it really is bottom-tier third world, there was no basic structure for his foundation and a lot of people thought Craig was crazy."

“He could have got involved with something a lot easier but, fortunately, he stuck with it.”

Craig Bellamy

> www.craigbellamyfoundation.org