Referee Kofi Bampo, at the weekend, blew the final whistle to pull the curtain down on a month-long fun soccer challenge which emblazoned the forecourt and open parking lot of the Achimota Retail Centre (ARC) with spectacular sporting action.

The ARC Fun House Soccer Challenge saw shoppers, children, parents and even tenants of Centre locking horns amongst themselves in well-administered football bouts every weekend, to claim honours in the beautiful game.

The Soccer Challenge was designed and launched by ARC's Management a month ago in collaboration with the Achimota Recreational Arcade(ARA) to entertain children and create an engaging sporting platform for adults and shoppers visiting the centre during the month of August.

'The ultimate objective for the soccer challenge was to create a platform for children and our adult customers to socialize and have fun engaging competitively in the most passionate sport in the country,' said Anthony Asamoah, Marketing Manager at Achimota Retail Centre.

A section of the shopping centre's open parking behind the Food Court was refit and transformed into a superb Astroturf pitch with two mini goal posts set on two ends and teams of seven players aside scuffled against one another in 10-minute-long encounters as ambient music and commentary on the action streamed across the park from a special DJ outpost.



For all the three tournaments that were held, children, parents, shoppers and tenants were signed up into different teams that subsequently played against each other on weekends in a gala which always attracted animated spectatorship from visitors and pedestrians who watched from the walkway along the Nsawam Highway.

Every shopper who made a minimum purchase of Ghc100 in any store at ARC in the course of the week, secured automatic qualification to be signed on to a team for the soccer challenge.



'This has been a rare opportunity for me and my boys. The pitch is great, the team spirit and bonding opportunities are incredible and the atmosphere has been simply fantastic. I haven't had this experience in ages,' said an adult player whose two sons featured respectively in the first and second challenges.

The Marketing Manager said: "We had a total of three exciting challenges within the month involving three categories of teams and players. The first challenge comprised random visitors to the Centre and participants who signed up for their wards while the second encounter involved teenagers, most of whom were on vacation and had come to the centre to have fun."



The final challenge which closed at the weekend, was the tenant competition, involving some ten stores from the centre and in which the food and grocery giant, Shoprite, won with ease. Other participants in the tenant challenge were Basilissa, Infinix, The Outlet, The Chop Bar, MTN, Sweet Roses, Chicken Inn and Pizza Hut.

Located at Dome, near the St John's Grammar School on the Accra-Nsawam Highway, Achimota Retail Centre is the preferred destination for modern shopping and quality recreation in the entire Ga East Municipality of Accra. Over the past two years, the Centre has brought convenient and secured one-stop shopping to several communities in the north-eastern sector of the capital, including Dome, Tantra Hill, Ofankor, Ashongman Estates, Kwabenya and the Achimota township.