The Colchester United Female Academy will be heading off to Sweden later this week to take part in the Gothia Cup once again.

The Gothia Cup has been running many years and has seen over 690,000 young people from 124 different countries participate.

Over 1,500 teams take part yearly and the organisers are rightly proud that this competition uses football to bring youth from all over the world together.

This time the Academy will be taking two squads at U19s and U17s level and hope to go one better than last year, where they lost out to the Nigerian Academy, who were the eventual winners of the tournament.

Despite putting up a resilient battle, they were unable to overcome the Nigerians who were a formidable force and the U's Academy lost out 3-0.

The trip this time has received some welcome sponsorship from 'Handelsbanken', an international Bank based in Sweden. More information about them can be found by clicking this link: www.handelsbanken.com.