Editorial Comment: Kudos to Delta for football boost

DELTA Beverages yesterday unveiled a $3.4 million three-year sponsorship deal with the domestic Premiership in another massive vote of confidence in football in this country at a time when the future of our national game has never looked this secure and promising.

After months of uncertainty in which the prophets of doom, who are always seized with negativity in every sector of this country were preaching the gospel that this marriage had collapsed and our top-flight league would be unbranded this year, the PSL’s flagship sponsors have shamed them by extending their marriage with the league by another three years.

They have even gone a step further by introducing a new one-off knockout cup, the $50 000 Super Cup, which will feature the winners of the championship and the team that wins the Chibuku Super Cup, which is the flagship knockout football tournament in the top-flight league.

This match will bring the curtain down on the season and provide the winners of both the championship and the Chibuku Super Cup, who get the tickets to represent this country in the CAF inter-club competitions the following year, with an opportunity to boost their coffers with money to help them prepare for their African adventure.

Of course, there will always be those who feel the sponsors should have ploughed more into the sponsorship package, but in these tough economic times, we feel their financial injection carries its weight in gold and should be applauded.

Delta Beverages have been our top-flight league’s all-weather friends, providing our leading clubs with an incentive to fight for both in the championship and the flagship knockout tournament, and at a time when big sponsors, across the Limpopo, are pulling the plugs on their partnerships with football, it’s refreshing that we have a sponsor who remains committed to the success of our national game.

It’s also wrong to just read the PSL’s marriage with Delta in terms of the figures that come from their flagship sponsor because there is more to it than just the money that ends up being transferred into the coffers of our top-flight league.

For, by convincing a company like Delta, one of the biggest companies that we have in this country, that the league is a good brand to partner with, it also sends the right signal to the other sponsors to also come on board and play their part, in a number of ways, to pour their money into the league.

Their marketing agents will be telling them that if a company like Delta believes this is a league that gives a firm value for money, through partnering it, they also should consider coming on board as part of their marketing initiatives.

We won’t be surprised, in the coming weeks, to see more corporate partners joining this bandwagon, simply because Delta have led the way, because that was also the case when this company led the way, in 2011, by going into bed with the PSL.

We could soon be seeing clubs like Dynamos, Highlanders and CAPS United — the big boys of our league — securing deals with corporate partners in the coming weeks or months because there is a lot of excitement that is being generated in our football which appears to be on the rise again after years of stagnation.

Only on Sunday, CAPS United shocked the world by eliminating five-time African champions TP Mazembe — a club which has been crowned champions of the continent three times in the past eight years, has played in the final of the FIFA Club World Cup, is run on a $10 million annual budget enabling it to buy some of the best players on the continent and owns two private jets — from the CAF Champions League.

That victory showed us that our game is moving in the right path, at a time when we also expect huge financial injections to come into the coffers of ZIFA now that there have been changes at the top of the leadership of the game at CAF, which would see the national association servicing the grassroots structures that badly need to be attended to.

In the past, there have been fears that our football is stalked by a lot of controversy, which ends up corroding the brands of those who partner them, but we have been seeing a drift from all this because, when one looks at our top-flight league now, there is a huge number of clubs that are backed by corporates.

This means that the people who lead them have a responsibility to ensure they don’t involve themselves in controversy since doing so might attract sanctions from their employers and that is why we now have a league where controversial incidents are no longer as common as was in the past.

This is what the sponsors want and we are happy that Delta Beverages have led the way and, from next week, the domestic Premiership — already cheered by CAPS United’s success in the Champions League — can roar into life amid expectations that this could be a very interesting season and, crucially, its future is in safe hands.

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