Year nine pupils Beth Christie, Rebecca Dunstone, Amelia Hearn, Aliah Khan and Varnah Suthaharan will now go on to represent Watford Football Club at a regional play-off competition against other Premier League Clubs. Should the team win the Play-Offs, they will then progress to the Final.

The Premier League Enterprise programme is a competition that encourages young people to come up with ideas related to a football business task set by Premier League Executive Chairman, Richard Scudamore. This season’s Challenge is creating a plan to increase their Club’s international fan base and its income streams specifically from the USA.

There are 31 Premier League and English Football League clubs taking part in this year’s Challenge, which began in 2009 and run in partnership with Sport Relief. Since then it has seen over 11,000, thirteen-to-fifteen year-olds take part in educational sessions with clubs.

Watford FC’s challenge began with the school teams attending Vicarage Road stadium for a unique tour with the Club’s Community Sports and Education Trust. The secondary school children then had to work hard over the following weeks to perfect their presentations, teaming up with a business mentor from the Trust.

The teams from St Michael’s Catholic High School, Bushey Meads as well as a boys’ team from Rickmansworth School joined the eventual winners on the day for the heat.

The standard of the presentations was high, as they pitched their ideas to a judging panel made up of Richard Walker, Head of Communications at Watford FC, Gayle Clark, HR Manager at Watford FC and Chris Luff, Co-Founder and Sales Director of Freedom Communications.

Liz Pickford, Head of Careers & Work Related Learning at Rickmansworth School summarised her schools involvement in what proved to be a great day with one hundred percent of the pupils involved saying they had enjoyed the experience;

“The pupils are buzzing with joy at the whole experience, I don’t think they realised quite how much goes on behind the scenes at a football club so this has been great. The boys were very magnanimous in defeat and needless to say the girls are just ecstatic and are already getting excited for the next round.”