adminThe course, which has brought together various office bearers from the Premier Soccer League and their fellow Zifa affiliates, began in Harare yesterday and will run until July 14 with the Fifa duo of Henry Tandau of Tanzania and Swaziland’s Timothy Shongwe conducting it.
Zifa chief executive Jonathan Mashingaidze said the course would cover a wide range of topics that are critical in the administration of the game, which include general organisation, rules and regulations, planning, finance, communication and event management.
Mashingaidze said the course participants, drawn from Zifa structures around the country including provinces and even the association’s headquarters, would also go through the Fifa and Caf statutes and human resources management.
“We decided to do this course on account of the need to strengthen our systems in terms of part time and full time staffers. The whole idea is to make sure everyone speaks from the same wave length when we run the sport . . . we would not want the different facets like coaches, referees and administrators going in different directions,’’ Mashingaidze said.
The Zifa chief executive said his association had in the last four years put more energy in improving the quality of the coaches and referees in the country with limited attention being given to the administrators. “Over the last four years emphasis has been on coaching and referees’ courses but there is need for the man in the office to also understand the statutes and all the requirements of the game.
“We have also invited the sponsors who are within the football portfolio to be at the course which will also be highly interactive and this will help them appreciate some of the game’s requirements and expectations. After this another course will be held for our national instructors,’’ Mashingaidze said. Mashingaidze acknowledged that a number of their administrators still had a lot of shortcomings which only such courses like the one which began in Harare yesterday could help to address.
“We want those who take up football leadership positions to have taken basic football administration courses and not operate diametrically to the rest of the football family’’.
The domestic game has often been littered with a host of administrative boobs, some of which have proved costly with big sponsorship deals being lost on some occasions.
It is worrying that local football continues to be pegged back by player ownership wrangles and on some occasions players being registered with different clubs at the same time.
The introduction of a specialised department at the Zifa headquarters run by Timothy Mazhindu that now handles player movements through Fifa’s concept of transfer matching system has, however, helped reduce the ownership wrangles.
With Mazhindu specialising in creating players “passports’’, it has become easier to trace each player’s movement from the time they featured in the amateur ranks to their rise to a professional career.
Online Reporter