Pärnu, Estonia—The 2017 Pärnu Summer Cup, a youth football tournament held in the framework of the project "Play Football Make Peace," was held from June 29 to July 2.
About 3,000 young players from Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Russia, Poland, Estonia, and even Iceland came to Pärnu, a seaside city known as “the summer capital of Estonia.”
The first junior football tournament was held in Pärnu 15 years ago. Over the years, it has become the largest in the Baltic States.
This year’s tournament started on June 29 with a traditional procession of all 3,000 players carrying flags. Among the flags of clubs and countries, there also fluttered the flag of the "Peace Road," an initiative of UPF.
As the boys and girls from different countries passed through the streets of the city, they demonstrated the peaceful brotherhood of sports.
The organizer of the Russian teams at the tournament, Dmitry Samko, for six years has been bringing the Moscow teams, and in his opinion, lately the level of teams and the tournament itself has grown significantly.
Among the 30 teams whose players were born in the year 2007, this year a team from Moscow’s Brateyevo District, under the guidance of the coach Vadim, took fourth place.
All the participants not only gained international sports experience but also made sure that language and cultural barriers were no obstacle to friendly dialogue, especially when playing football for peace.