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Ray Bande in MUTARE
THE Castle Lager Premiership football’s first ever Manicaland derby pitting Manica Diamonds and Tenax CS FC will be played without aspiring Golden Boot winner Nyasha Chintuli and striking partner Farai Mugumwa owing to parent club restrictions.
Manica Diamonds and Tenax clash in the last round of the first half of the season at Sakubva on Sunday.
Never had the two Mutare-based teams played against each other in the league competition after their first encounter in the season precursor the Chibuku Super Cup competition last year.
And on Sunday, the two teams lock horns in a match that has more than three points at stake.
However, Manica Diamonds’ coach Johanisi Nhumwa will have limited options in his faltering strike-force department as he will have to make do without Mugumwa and the reliable Chintuli.
Both Mugumwa and Chintuli are Tenax players who are on a season loan to Manica Diamonds and their contracts do not allow them to face their parent club — Tenax.
Nhumwa confirmed that they will not be fielding the striking duo.
“This is something that we have always known from the onset. Their contracts do not allow them to face their parent club. It is normal and we have enough players to replace them. In fact, last week we even played without one of them (Mugumwa) as he was attending to some family issues,” said Nhumwa.
Mugumwa and Chintuli have scored a total of six goals since joining the Gem Boys early this year with the former finding the target five times in the nine matches he has featured on the Manica Diamonds team sheet while the later scored once in the 11 matches he has played, coming in as a substitute five times.
Even though the former Mavingo United gaffer played down the impact of Chintuli and Mugumwa’s unavailability for selection, the absence of the two strikers, especially Chintuli, might be a big blow to Gem Boys given the need for options in search for goals.
The parent club restrictions are often overlooked, important dimension to loan transfers.
World over, players on loan are often prohibited from playing against their parent club, either by league regulations or private clauses.
A restriction like this for teams that depend on loans, is very likely to affect the outcome of matches between that club and any parent club.
The idea of loan players playing against their parent clubs does raise some fair-play and integrity concerns.
Might a loan player deliberately play poorly so as not to upset their parent club’s management structure?
Or even worse, might a parent club secretly demand a loan player plays badly if they want a future at the parent club?
“Parent Club” restrictions across national leagues.
In Zimbabwe, the statutes at national level are silent.
ZIFA spokesperson, Xolisani Gwesela, said: “We do not have guidelines that restrict players from playing against their parent clubs. Players on loan are deemed to belong to the clubs that they are turning out for at the particular moment.”
Ideally, not every national league regulates this matter in the same way.
Some explicitly prohibit loan players playing against a parent club, while others do not attempt to regulate and others still defer to the judgement of the club. Leagues with regulations that prohibit a loan player playing against their parent clubs include the English Premier League and the Portuguese Primeira Liga.
In these leagues, clubs have no say about the matter and are restricted to accepting the regulations that no loaned player shall face their parent club. On the other hand, this rule is not present in many other leagues, such as La Liga (Spain) and Ligue 1 (France). This situation prompted the use of so called “fear clauses” by some Spanish clubs, prohibiting on-loan players from facing their parent club, unless a big fee, often unsustainable, was paid to that club. Sometimes, clubs use clauses that completely forbid the player from playing against his parent club, without the option to pay for that right.
A curious third case is Brazil, where the “Confederação Brasileira de Futebol” acknowledges, in its regulations, that loan clauses regarding a player facing his parent club are a matter for the clubs to decide privately.
Not long ago the rules stated that clauses forbidding players from facing their parent clubs were not valid, but due to the proliferation of “gentlemen’s agreements”, difficult to prove, the rules were changed.
So these are some of the common approaches taken by different leagues, but what do FIFA and UEFA say about the matter?
The FIFA and UEFA approach
FIFA’s Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (or “RSTP”) play an important role in worldwide football.
In these Regulations Article 10 specifically relates to loans but does not deal with the question of whether a loan player should be able to face their parent club.
Peter Tanyanyiwa
Online Reporter