adminI WAS impressed two weeks ago when the Premier Soccer League conducted a workshop for club administrators.
The purpose was to educate them about better practices and also club licensing soon to be a must with all professional clubs in the world of football. All but one of the 16 clubs participated with a fair number sending full time staffers.
This is a welcome development. Gone are the days when the sport was entrusted to volunteers who were guilty of stealing time from their own employers. At the end these guys did not give the best to soccer as more often than not they were also pre-occupied with other chores.
Sport, soccer in particular, has become big business and a big employer apart from providing happy moments to millions in the country and billions abroad.
It now requires fulltime attention with qualified personnel entrusted to key positions.
Beginning next year Zimbabwean clubs which do not conform to club licensing will be barred from taking part in African tournaments.
The move is meant to push the clubs to be more professional. With professionalism clubs will make more money out of their operations.
Gone are the days when clubs existed to provide entertainment to the masses only. Those that stick to that miss the key point that football enterprises are businesses out to make more money for themselves to guarantee a foundation for more successes.
It is encouraging to note one of the country’s oldest clubs Highlanders have engaged Ndumiso Gumede as chief executive officer. The Bosso executive has to be applauded for recognising the value in him. He has been there before and achieved more than all of them combined.
Gumede has been exposed to better practices in his travels with Zifa. He is the right man to set up structures at the club and in two years hopefully when he steps down to take his deserved rest from a game that gave him both fame and enemies, Bosso will be in a position to have a fully fledged secretariat with an administration manager, finance manager, marketing manager, estate manager, technical director and other staff in line with Caf expectations.
Another area to move to would be to talk to the local authority and have Barbourfields Stadium available in a lease arrangement.
Caf and Fifa argue that in order for clubs to make more money, they have to run their own stadia and have vibrant junior development structures. Bosso who have over 11 players produced by their junior development in the last four years playing Premiership football would be able to close such gaps with a man like Gumede working full time.
He is passionate about juniors and his baby, the “Chompkin Just Play Initiative” produced a number of players who went on to play Premiershp football, notably Evans Gwekwerere and Brian Moyo.
In line with Caf expectations, club officials must be sincere on who they employ. They are not looking for “spanner boys”, but people capable of bringing solutions and success on the table.
Results of the club licensing will not be felt immediately, but in the long run clubs will reap from that. Leakages of talent will be plugged as well.
In most instances, in football people fail because they do not plan. It is not a surprise that the Warriors and the Mighty Warriors were knocked out of international competitions in the last three weeks.
Treating national team activity as events is effectively suicide. Success comes as a result of investing time and resources towards a common goal.
Clubs and Zifa should give themselves time to achieve certain goals. This means careful identification of personnel, drafting of programmes to be followed to the letter and scouting well in time and have training camps to allow combinations and bonding of players.
With Zimbabwe out of men and women’s soccer tournaments, this is the time to plan ahead.
Losing Zifa presidential candidate Trevor Carelse-Juul is on record as saying he would love to help the national association come up with a pool of 13-14 year-olds who will in three to four years conquer Africa and go to the World Championships. In seven years as seniors he said World Cup football would be a reality.
That is looking and planning ahead.
PSL and Zifa should be applauded for investing in the training of administrators.
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Online Reporter