The Arsenal Foundation works in partnership with Save the Children to deliver our Coaching for Life programme at the Za’atari refugee camp in Jordan – and it’s a life-changing experience for all concerned.
“My name is Pranav and I’m 24. I was born in India but I now live in London and I first joined Arsenal on the Coach Development Programme.
“I have always been passionate about football, and during my Masters in Scotland I had taken up football coaching to earn some money and just get more involved in football. I wanted to get into football as a sports psychologist, but after joining the local grassroots club I started falling in love with coaching.
“Towards the end of my Masters I was looking for a way to progress my career in football and I came across the Arsenal’s CDP. I applied like I did for 100 other roles, laughing to myself and thinking, ‘Fat chance anything is coming out of this,’ as I was in a tiny village in Scotland. But it did!
“The role interested me because I knew I had a lot to learn in coaching. I had been working on a lot of community sessions at my grassroots club and I wanted to work on Arsenal in the Community’s disability football section. The main attraction was the community side, but also I was a boy from India and just being inside a Premier League organisation was far beyond any of my wildest dreams.
“Before Coaching for Life, I put myself forward for anything and everything at the club and I believe I experienced as much as I could with Arsenal in the Community. I worked in primary schools, on the grassroots Football Plus side and with senior citizens who had prostate cancer. I helped run the Whittington Park League and I worked on the Freedom from Torture sessions with refugees. I was also selected to work with Arsenal Football Development and the Arsenal Pre-Academy.
“One of the biggest reasons I wanted to get involved in the Za’atari project was due to our coach Drew Tyler. Drew has some of the best ideas of coaching that I have come across. Also the experience of working with refugees in a camp in Jordan is an opportunity that comes across once in a lifetime, if you’re lucky. I was lucky enough that I got to experience it twice. Coaching children and being around good people brings me genuine joy and I think Drew had noticed that as well, and thought it would be good for me.
“Seeing those people at camp have so much love and so much warmth despite living in such difficult circumstances put a lot of things in my own life into perspective,” says Pranav
“There was a lot of nervous and anxious energy in me before the trip because at that time the political climate in Jordan was not the safest. Having Drew and the Save the Children team was an absolute blessing as from the day we arrived they did everything in their power to make us feel safe and comfortable. I believe I’m quite adaptable, and within two or three days I felt at ease and lost all that nervous energy. The Save the Children team in Jordan are absolutely amazing, taking us out for meals in the evening and making sure that during the day at the camp we had someone with us all the time if we needed anything.
“Our days at camp were simply incredible. Our jobs were to mainly conduct coach education sessions for the coaches within the camp, so in the first week we conducted a workshop for two days and then watched coaches deliver the sessions and gave them feedback, introducing them to new games they could play with the kids around the resilience activities and topics of that week.
“The topics were really important within that setting because they were helping the kids at camp be kids. It’s so common for children to start working at a very young age and having to deal with camp life, so the pitches were actually a place where the kids could just be themselves and at the same time learn a lot about emotional regulation, communication and other topics that they probably wouldn’t ever have had the chance to learn about.
“The programme is an absolute game-changer for the girls at the camp. As a man I wasn’t able to see a lot of the sessions, but I caught glimpses of the girls leaving the sessions and they used to be so happy and filled with joy. For the boys the football was more of a competition and a chance for them to prove themselves in front of their friends.
“I saw the impact Coaching for Life has through one of the junior coaches. He was at one point one of the children who used to attend the football sessions, and he went on to become a coach who was very understanding of the disparity between men and women in the camp, and who understood the importance of the topics we were trying to teach the children.
“On a personal level the trip made me develop a lot of gratitude, and helped me realise that happiness sometimes is genuinely a choice. Seeing those people at camp have so much love and so much warmth despite living in such difficult circumstances put a lot of things in my own life into perspective.
“Initially I found the trip to be hard emotionally because I was finding it difficult to deal with the unfairness and cruelty of the world. It was heavy at times to listen to some of the people’s stories. It is very hard for me to say exactly what I learned on that trip, to write something that encompasses it all, but what I can say is that it has changed me, in so many ways, for the better.”
Pranav started with us by delivering community sessions on the Coach Development Programme
Copyright 2025 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
