There are youth soccer summer academies and camps all over the place. Throw a rock and you might hit one. Plenty of them are now affiliated with top tier European clubs, and a few others are supported by star players themselves.
One of those camps is the RVP Tournament, a youth soccer event hosted in Rotterdam by local boy turned global icon Robin Van Persie. Fittingly, Van Persie is always in attendance at the event, and he makes a football cameo at the end of the sessions.
For his 2013 rendition, Van Persie was joined by fellow Dutch professional football (read: soccer) stars Karim Touzani and Tonny Vilhena, who play in the Dutch Eridivisie for Sparta Rotterdam and Feyenoord respectively. Together, the trio put on a keep-away clinic of absolutely epic proportions when matched up against hyper-charged youth players.
As you can see in the video above, the poor RVP tourney stars were no match for the real RVP himself. In fact, Touzani and Vilhena were a far cry from Van Persie’s flicks and tricks as well, though they did show plenty of technical wizardry as well.
While the keep away competition might be considered rude or just plain unfair, it’s easy to see just how thrilled the kiddos were to be chasing around after Van Persie and co.
The good natured soccer taunting fits in with Van Persie’s recent exploits, which included this absolutely fantastic personalized autograph to CNN’s Piers Morgan, a lifelong Arsenal fan who spent the entire season attempting (and failing) to taunt Van Persie for his defection to Manchester United.
RVP got the last laugh on Morgan, and he helped a sextet of young Dutch footballers get plenty of chuckles at their own expense, as well. That’s a pretty solid month for anyone, even a world famous international footballer.
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