The Ukrainian Football Association, despite the most challenging period for our country, has become one of the associations that joined FIFA's new Talent Development Scheme.

"“For FIFA, one of the main goals is to give a chance to every talent. And launching this program is one of the keys to achieving this goal”— according to the words of FIFA President Gianni Infantino.

The author and chief coordinator of the program is Arsène Wenger, head of global football development at FIFA, who insists that giving a chance to every talent, regardless of where or when they were born, should be a strategic activity and responsibility of each national association in centralized support and leadership on a global level from FIFA.

One of the key principles of FIFA for 2020–2023 is to increase global competitiveness and increase the number of national teams and clubs that actually compete at the highest level for top honors. Therefore, it is necessary to develop talents while respecting local conditions at every stage of this process. The new program offers individual assistance to member associations to help them fully realize their potential and ultimately improve global competitiveness for future football.

The launch of the program was preceded by a lengthy global research process in each of FIFA's 211 member associations. During 2020–2021, an analysis of the football ecosystem was conducted in every country regarding player recruitment and youth football system organization, providing a clear picture of the existing global imbalance in football and simultaneously the potential to overcome this imbalance.

Since then, during 2023–2026 each national association that participated in the analysis of the football ecosystem and previously declared interest in joining the program by proposing their own vision and pilot project will work with a mentor appointed by FIFA to build a step-by-step and strategic path in identifying and supporting its young talents. Thus, since the beginning of 2023, the UAF has been working with Finnish expert Hannu Tikkanen. The coordinator of the program at the UAF is First Vice President Oleg Protasov.

The Ukrainian Football Association realizes that identifying, supporting and developing young talents is a key priority for preserving and developing Ukrainian football as a whole, but especially in wartime conditions and during the post-war recovery period. Of course, work with talents begins with mass football as a key tool to initially attract children to football, training coaches at all levels, which is an extremely important element both for development and retention of players, managing databases and tracking their young players. This applies equally to men's and women's football.

Within the pilot project to implement FIFA's Talent Development Program, the UAF focused on identifying young talents through testing their natural physical abilities and further organizational support for developing identified potential talents. This process must be nationwide, but currently focuses at the regional level, namely in OTHs (Oblast Territorial Hromadas), towns, and villages, where children have never been involved in similar testing or organized football processes. This approach will allow to identify and support all talented players by informing nearby youth football academies and DYSHS (Children's Sports Schools) about their potential.

The main tool of the project is an analytical system developed specifically for testing children aged 8–12 years old to assess physical abilities and potential for development in case they are engaged in a professionally organized training process. Both boys and girls participate in this process.

The analytical system has an online platform with a unique database of information from testing results and children's videos, allowing children to monitor and improve their results, parents and coaches to track dynamics, as well as support the development of scouting systems in youth football. There are few examples at the European level where such a system is coordinated by the national association, so we also create a positive precedent and potential case with our experience. The platform and system are constantly updated and improved.

The UAF is very active in training coaches, continuously introducing new courses and licenses for new categories of coaches to support mass football coaching education to ensure better player pathways and experiences from the moment they join the game. Within the talent development project, all coaches and instructors from OTHs where project events take place will be involved in the educational process, who are unlikely to have been covered by other training under different circumstances. Also, graduates of UAF's 'D' license courses and UEFA's 'C' licenses, who underwent training earlier, can gain practical experience by attending testing events.

Within the first phase of the pilot project, a series of testing events in OTHs in non-frontline areas (with strict adherence to all safety requirements) and coach training are planned. In total, activities of this pilot project aim to cover up to 3,000 children and over 200 coaches from rural areas.

The project is implemented in cooperation with the Football Institute at the National University of Physical Education and Sports of Ukraine.