{"id":120439,"date":"2025-05-21T18:12:15","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T18:12:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/120439\/"},"modified":"2025-05-21T18:12:15","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T18:12:15","slug":"william-shows-off-football-skills-in-partnership-with-street-soccer-scotland","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/120439\/","title":{"rendered":"William shows off football skills in partnership with Street Soccer Scotland"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Prince of Wales has kicked off a partnership with a Scottish football charity and hinted that an Aston Villa favourite could join him for the next visit.<\/p>\n

William joined a practice session run by Street Soccer Scotland, being backed by his Royal Foundation, which will fund a range of initiatives at the charity\u2019s branch in Leith, near Edinburgh.<\/p>\n

The financial support from the foundation\u2019s Community Impact Project will also help the charity create Leith United \u2013 a collaboration with Leith Community Centre and YMCA Edinburgh.<\/p>\n

\"Royal<\/p>\n

William in action (Chris Jackson\/PA)<\/p>\n

The prince met YMCA user Shaniah Gilgun, aged 10, and learnt about her efforts with other youngsters to improve housing conditions in the area, but the conversation turned to football when he spotted a poster of Aston Villa.<\/p>\n

Villa fan William mentioned the club\u2019s captain, who also leads the Scottish national side, telling Shaniah: \u201cMaybe I should bring John McGinn\u2026 might have to wait till he retires \u2013 we\u2019ll put it in the pipeline.\u201d<\/p>\n

He added: \u201cHe promised me he would come up and show me around.\u201d<\/p>\n

After asking a group of children about their football teams during his visit to the community centre, he said of son Prince Louis: \u201cMy youngest supports five different teams now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Royal<\/p>\n

William was impressed by the work of amateur artists at Leith Community Centre (Chris Jackson\/PA)<\/p>\n

Shaniah later mentioned William\u2019s praise for her housing campaign: \u201cHe said it was a really good thing and that we should keep doing it and only good will come out of it.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen he mentioned John McGinn, I said, \u2018That\u2019s a deal\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Street Soccer Scotland was founded by David Duke in Leith in 2009 before he opened centres across Scotland to deliver free football-themed training and personal development programmes to support people experiencing issues like poor mental health, addiction, homelessness and isolation.<\/p>\n

The charity will use the Royal Foundation grant to renovate Leith Community Centre, enhance sports-based initiatives at the site, enable outreach work in the community and fund an impact manager over three years to co-ordinate grassroots leaders and local partnerships.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Prince of Wales has kicked off a partnership with a Scottish football charity and hinted that an…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":120440,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5009],"tags":[102,748,53754,4884,31689,53758,53755,18427,712,53757,53756,16,15,7712],"class_list":{"0":"post-120439","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-scotland","8":"tag-aston-villa","9":"tag-britain","10":"tag-football-teams","11":"tag-great-britain","12":"tag-john-mcginn","13":"tag-leith","14":"tag-leith-united","15":"tag-royal-foundation","16":"tag-scotland","17":"tag-scottish-football","18":"tag-street-soccer","19":"tag-uk","20":"tag-united-kingdom","21":"tag-william"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114547179121664424","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=120439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/120439\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/120440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=120439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=120439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=120439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}