FIFA President Gianni Infantino has welcomed Kanya Keomany, General Secretary of the Lao Football Federation (LFF) to Paris, for a meeting to discuss football development progress and future opportunities. The meeting also provided Mr Infantino the opportunity to again congratulate Ms Keomany on her recent election to the FIFA Council, in which she became the first Laotian to be elected. “It is great to see the strides that are being made to develop football in Laos, and FIFA is ready to support any way we can be that in relation to the national training centre, to the ongoing development of women’s football, or any other projects that can help elevate Lao football,” the FIFA President said. General Secretary Keomany provided President Infantino with an update on the progress of the expansion project of the LFF National Training Centre – which is being constructed with the help of USD 0.75 million funding from the FIFA Forward programme. Following the meeting, Ms Keomany explained more about the project: “This expansion is the continued project after we built the two pitches for our training centre – this training centre is being used for our national teams, and also for the local clubs that do not have the pitches to train.”

In addition to the infrastructure support being provided by FIFA Forward, President Infantino and Ms Keomany talked about the rapidly progressing plans for expanding the women’s game across the country – also with the support of additional FIFA Forward funding. “Today we also discussed with the President that we hope we can use this fund to help with the competitions – because after COVID [everything] is coming back to normal,” she continued. “We have more competitions and especially this year we will have the women’s football league, launched for the first time for Laos. “For women’s football we’ve been doing good in terms of national level, but we’ve never had the league before to produce the new players to continue the development – so this year we are finally having [that]. “We planned to have that before COVID, but because of that everything stopped. This year, with the [FIFA Women’s] World Cup, [it] is the perfect time to launch this.”