Coca Cola to fund young player at every league club

Coca Cola, sponsor of the Football League, has announced that every League club will receive funding to have a young up-and-coming or apprentice player join them for the 2005/06 season - if the clubs comine to match a Coca Cola goals target this season.

The announcement was made at the launch of the Coca Cola £1m goal challenge.

Coke has challenged all 72 clubs to score a combined total of 4,500 goals this season, and beat the current record of 4,354.

Brian Laws, manager of our opposition for Thursday night, Scunthorpe, said "It's a marvellous idea. I could get two YT youngsters straight away. And nice for the fans to know that we've got an extra player or two thanks to Coca Cola."

Sky TV's Chris Kamara said "The money will mean everything to league clubs. Everyone connected with football will realise the real worth of this."

Coca Cola also announced it's changing its usual brand colours to adopt the colours of each league club - so while the company's perimeter board ads at Sunderland would remain red and white in keeping with SAFC's club colours, at West Ham it will be claret and blue, black and amber at Hull City and black and white at Darlington. In-programme advertising for Coke will continue the colour schemes.