Story added: 9th April 2018

CSF's Dan Wynne explains how money raised from this May's Legends game will help support the local community

Last week, the upcoming Norwich City Legends fixture received a sprinkling of stardust as we unveiled three new members of the Inter Forever squad – headlined by all-time world great, Jurgen Klinsmann.

Herr Klinsmann will join the likes of Maicon, Javier Zanetti, Giorgos Karagounis, and Francesco Toldo at Carrow Road in May, while we also get the chance to welcome back some Canary heroes from the last quarter-century and celebrate one of the most famous chapters in our club’s history.

The addition of these world stars has created a real buzz around the game but amidst the excitement of the Klinsmann announcement, we were perhaps guilty of underplaying the importance of the event to the Community Sports Foundation and our vital fundraising campaign to build ‘The Nest’ – a new community hub on the edge of Norwich.

We officially kicked off the campaign in February, revealing plans for the second phase of development at the former Anglian Windows site in Horsford, which will allow us to reach a further 12,000 people in Norfolk.

It’s a difficult task to summarise the range of people that we help in a sweeping statement; it includes people with disabilities and those who may not have had the best start in life, but we also keep older people active, help children into sport and to stay healthy, and improve the prospects of young people with education, volunteering opportunities, and life skills.

That’s why The Nest will be so unique; we can help all of those people in one place thanks to facilities such as a gym, classrooms, a sports hall, seven grass football pitches and one floodlit 3G football pitch, as well as residential bunk boxes and social areas.

It will however cost a total of £9.4m to make this a reality – £2.5m of that from our public fundraising campaign and the rest from grants and other funding opportunities, and while the Legends game alone won’t raise that figure, we are hoping that it will be our largest single contributor in 2018 and we are really grateful to Inter for the opportunity.

The Inter Forever team, led by the great Italian goalkeeper Francesco Toldo, have a real passion for helping community projects and that was evident when Mr Toldo (I don’t feel like I can call him Francesco yet) visited the Foundation at the end of last year.

He presented us with a book that showcased the work of Inter Campus, the social project run by Inter that currently works in 22 countries to provide community youth football programmes for children that need their help.

In turn, we explained our plans for The Nest and he spoke about how pleased Inter Forever were that they could help by bringing a stellar squad to Carrow Road and hopefully attracting a big crowd.

Community is a value shared by both teams; the returning Norwich City Legends will all have been involved in community activity during their time at Carrow Road and many have continued their association with the Foundation after their playing days; Adam Drury is even a full time member of the team!

We hope that if you are still on the fence about supporting the game, that you will come along for a great day out with an enormous slice of nostalgia (including an amazing early-nineties stadium playlist that we’ve already begun compiling).

If you can make it, you will be helping to improve the lives of many, many people in Norfolk and we as a Foundation will be extremely grateful.

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