A Maltese priest who played football in his youth has been praised by the BBC after he combined the sport with his missionary zeal and built a stadium in Juticalpa, Honduras. 

"Juticalpa is an unlikely place for a football stadium. A dusty cattle-ranching town in the rural state of Olancho, it seems hard to believe there is an urgent need for a 20,000-capacity sporting arena in this part of Honduras.

Padre Alberto Gauci

"Yet amid the thick vegetation and rolling grasslands, a team of mud-caked workers is putting the finishing touches to the Estadio Juan Ramon Breve Vargas, the biggest stadium of its kind outside the capital, Tegucigalpa.

"Furthermore, the brains behind the project is neither an architect nor a civil engineer but a chain-smoking Franciscan priest from Malta, Father Alberto Gauci - whom everyone here simply calls Padre Alberto," the BBC reports.

Fr Gauci, described as a chain-smoking Franciscan, explained that Honduras has a very, very big problem with drugs. he explains as we sit on the stadium's concrete bleachers.

"I've been in meetings for the past 30 years, talking and discussing the problem of drugs, yet nobody does anything about it.

"We know there is a problem. So the problem has to go hand in hand with trying to find a solution."

His solution is football. A keen player in his youth, Padre Alberto remains an avid fan, especially of his adopted country's national side.

"You should have been here when Honduras classified for the World Cup!" he said , pulling hard on one of his cheap menthol cigarettes.

"We were out all night on the streets of Juticalpa. These people don't have very much to be proud of but I could see them smiling and feeling proud."

Padre Alberto hopes football will instil pride in Honduran children otherwise at risk from street violence

Padre Alberto

He wants to harness that positivity around the tournament in Brazil to try to encourage young people away from drugs, street gangs and violence in the country with the highest murder rate in the world.

"The stadium will be a place where the whole family can come together for any kind of spectacle - whether it's religion, sports or culture - sit down, have a roof over their heads and enjoy themselves," he says. "At least, that's my dream."

The stadium roofing system was designed and constructed by local builders.

The floodlights were imported from the United States and the turf is due to be laid by students at the local agricultural college.

Moreover, it was delivered on a budget of just $2m, only a quarter of which came from the local government. The rest came from donations.

Over the past 40 years he had also built a home for old people who used to die in the streets, an orphanage for street children, a nutritional centre, a kindergarten, a bakery, a healthcare centre for local AIDS patients and even a prison to tackle chronic overcrowding in the penal system.