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Four years ago Samir Ali cut a sad and pathetic figure, living in a men’s homeless hostel in Westminster. He had a violent temper, a drug habit, 20 stitches in his leg from a stabbing, and a criminal record, having been to prison at 17 for assault and again at 21, for robbery and possession of a knife and cannabis.

Samir routinely carried a switch-blade, was a heavy cannabis user and had so exasperated his single mother with his drug use that she had kicked him out at 17. “I was a thug, totally without thought for others and completely directionless in my life,” said Samir, 29.

But then something happened that changed his life. “The hostel sent me on a course,” he said. “They said they would sponsor me and all I had to do was turn up. The hostel thought the course might ease me towards employment.”

It turned out that the course was to do his FA Level-1 coaching qualification. “It was a revelation,” said Samir. “The hostel had no idea that football had been my passion and that I had been one of the star footballers when I was 16 at high school, but I hadn’t played since.

“When I went on that course, my love of football flooded back and something clicked. I reconnected with an uncomplicated joy that I’d experienced as a child. It made me want to stop smoking and be healthy. I started dreaming again. That was the day everything changed.”

It is this extraordinary transformative capacity of football that our London United campaign taps into. Funded by Vitality, we are training 100 football coaches who will work in the community and who, like Samir, come mostly from deprived backgrounds. These trainee coaches have been put forward by 18 grassroots charities across London that use football as a hook to engage young people on the margins of society, including groups such as London Tigers — who Samir now works for as a coach. To watch Samir today, surrounded by boisterous 10-year-olds from the Lisson Green estate in Westminster, who look up to him as a role model as he shows them how to “pass and move”, you would never guess that four years ago he was down and out.

Samir did not have the best start in life. His father, a restaurateur, died of a stroke when Samir was six, plunging the family into financial hardship. His mother worked long hours in a launderette and although his cousins and aunts helped support the family, the loss of his father was keenly felt by Samir.

“I never thought of myself as an angry person, but from a young age I had a quick temper and got into fights,” he said. At 12 Samir was excluded from school for hitting another pupil and by 15 he was regularly bunking school to smoke weed with his friends in the park. “My mum didn’t approve of my lifestyle and she kicked me out. At 17 I got into trouble with the police. I beat up someone from the estate, he pressed charges and I was sent to Feltham for 18 months.”

But prison did not reform Samir and he would soon return for another 18-month stint, this time at the adult prisons of Belmarsh, Glen Parva and Wandsworth. He said: “Until I was 24, I suppose I saw myself as part of the underworld. I had no ambition. I didn’t think about what I wanted to do with my life. I was just living in the moment, going with the flow.”

Then came the FA Level-1 coaching course. “It was like someone turned the light in me back on,” he said. He took six weeks to complete the course and soon after the council found him a flat and he got work volunteering with Street League, a charity that runs football sessions to engage disadvantaged young people and which tackles youth unemployment through football. “Several coaches at Street League had been in prison and they gave me advice about leaving my negative influences behind and concentrating on football,” Samir says.

“I stopped seeing my old friends and I took my FA Level-2 qualification. This was more difficult and it took me six months, but I felt a huge sense of pride. Over two years of volunteering, I learnt how to inspire children, to show them the beauty of football as well as staying focused on achieving something positive in their lives.”

Two years ago, while attending a friend’s wedding, he met London Tigers founder Mesba Ahmed who told him they were recruiting football coaches to work with children on London estates, including Lisson Green where Samir had grown up. “I told Mr Ahmed that I wanted to work for him but also about my criminal record and for a moment he seemed in two minds. He took a chance, offering me employment as a football coach, my first paid job.”

Samir started coaching the under-15s at the football cage on the Lisson Green estate. “The youngsters were rowdy and had a low attention span, but because I came from the same background, I was able to take charge,” he says.

“I knew I was winning when one day the head teacher at King Solomon High came down to the estate to see for himself what had made a difference to his pupils and why the worst behaved kids had improved so radically. He told us how impressed he was. He said the children were better behaved, more focused, had better social skills and were doing better at school. It made me feel amazing.”

Best of all, said Samir, he has since reconciled with his mother. “She is so proud of how I have turned my life around,” he beamed. “I was the black sheep of the family but now I am her pride and joy.”

Samir’s goal is to become a full-time professional coach, working with junior teams at clubs like QPR or Fulham. “Football pulled me out of gang culture and into the mainstream and has given me a sense of direction. I don’t do drugs, I live clean. Football coaching changed my life, but most importantly, it is allowing me to change the lives of others.”

Click here for more details of the London United campaign