Ready To Fight In The Gothia Cup 2022 Sweden, Indonesia Junior Soccer League (IJSL) Sends 15 Players

Release of 15 players in the 12-year-old group to the Gothia Cup (Cosmas Kopong Beda/VOI)

JAKARTA — The Indonesia Junior Soccer League (IJSL) is ready to compete in the 2022 Gothia Cup in Sweden. A total of 15 players in the 12 year age group will be sent to the tournament.

They were symbolically released by the Minister of Youth and Sports (Menpora) Zainudin Amali at the Wisma Kemenpora on Tuesday, July 12.

"We hope that these children have experience competing against teams from various countries. Hopefully they will later become part of the upcoming national team. They are still relatively young, 11-12 years old. So in the next 10 years we expect them to become part of the national team," said Amali.

The Gothia Cup is one of the biggest youth tournaments in the world. This year the tournament will take place from 16 to 23 July in Gothenburg, Sweden.

The IJSL team will fly to Sweden on Wednesday, July 13 tomorrow and will return to Indonesia on July 26.

"This IJSL team consists of players aged 11 to 12 years, selected from more than a thousand young players and lasts for four months, from February to June 2022," said team leader Novend Hippy in Jakarta on Tuesday, July 12.

For this year the team that was dispatched amounted to 24 people. The total consists of 15 players from 14 SSB, two coaches and seven officials.

The IJSL team will compete with 105 other teams from 15 countries. They are included in Group F along with three other teams, one team from Germany, and two home teams from Sweden.

Novend said that to get optimal results, the team had prepared themselves for one month, including a four-day training camp.

"Preparations include physical and mental training as well as strengthening match strategies so that it is hoped that with this careful preparation we can repeat the achievements of the previous team in 2018 and 2019 who won first place," he said.