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Grace Chingoma Sports Reporter
SOUTH African Football Association chief executive Dennis Mumble is happy with the interaction they had with the Premiership clubs who have in turn shown that they want to quickly implement all the aspects of the club licensing system so they can raise the standard of the local game.

Mumble has been in the country for the last few days in his capacity as Confederation of African Football administration instructor.

Speaking at the end of a two-day CAF, ZIFA Football Licensing seminar in Harare yesterday, Mumble said the clubs made it categorically clear that they are willing to observe the time-lines after going through five tenets of club licensing — sporting criteria, administrative and personnel criteria, infrastructure criteria and financial criteria.

“It has been a very good productive workshop. We were not here to common instruct the clubs on what to do we were here to work and to empower, to assist and to identify where the shortcomings are with respect to the work that has already been done and to ensure that everybody understands the time-lines that CAF has set.

“So our task here was to listen and had some rigorous exchanges and very productive exchanges. So one thing that we are happy about is the fact that the clubs themselves are very willing participants to make sure that they implement the club licensing system and the objectives behind it is to raise the standard of play, both in Zimbabwe and also across the African continent as part of FIFA’s world-wide programme to implement club licensing to improve the game.

“We are very happy with the exchange that we have had with all the clubs. Each club had their own input and I think we have agreed on the way forward with respect to what the clubs will do, what the association will do, what the PSL will do, and when they will do it that is quite important. There is still a lot of work that needs to be done but we are very happy with the pace and where the clubs themselves expect to do it,” said Mumble.

The veteran administrator, who was also the Chief Operations Officer for the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa said there should be a balance between governance structures and proper administration systems as these two work hand in glove.

“One of the pillars of club licensing system is to put proper governance structures in place but also to couple that with proper administrative systems because if you have good governance system and you don’t have the administrative or the operational support then it is really not going to help you much. So the club licensing really bring those two pieces together and I am sure a lot of questions that were asked over the last two days has been about how do you separate the roles between the chairman and the staff of the club for instance the chairman and the chief executive of the club or chairman of the league and chief executive of league.

“All those things were discussed here and I think there is clear understanding on the various roles of players in football generally speaking. There is a minimum criteria that CAF and FIFA sets for what needs to happen in terms of the staffing and the functions that must be performed in clubs and the clubs have shown the willingness to actually go out and do that,” he said.

During this workshop, Mumble said as instructors, they also got an appreciation of the challenges clubs are facing on the ground in relation to club licensing.

“What we have also gathered from this, the things we constantly learn ourselves as we go around the African continent are the challenges that the clubs face on the ground. Access to facilities, ownership or lack of ownership of the facilities and scheduling problems with the facilities that require very close co-operation with our authorities everywhere, working with local municipalities, working with national government for instance to provide the facilities, to make those facilities available to empower the clubs by giving a little bit more exposure to the clubs as partners in those facilities.

“So contractual relationships with those facilities were very much high on the agenda I think to the extent that it will empower the clubs, the club licensing system itself will promote professionalism to get the clubs to another level both commercial and financial and also governance perspective,” he said. ZIFA chief executive Jonathan Mashingaidze said the clubs have agreed to come up with a Harare Declaration

“This workshop was long overdue in coming given that we have been having communication with CAF in respect of having this kind of framework embraced by Zimbabwe and we are happy that at long last CAF have deployed a three-member mission to Zimbabwe to assist us in terms of addressing the five criteria around ensuring that we embrace professionalism as an institution.

“We are happy that the 16 clubs fully subscribed to the direction and beyond this we are going to come up with what we call the Harare Declaration, which declaration, will then commit ZIFA and the clubs to ensuring that the five criteria are then addressed and implemented to the letter and that we will also have a team that would be working with the clubs ensuring that the benchmarks are realised,” he said.

Mashingaidze added that the next month will see some activity as they get the ball rolling.

“So we believe in the next month there should be a follow through meeting with our clubs ensuring that we have rigged time-lines which we have to observe to the letter. We have a seminar taking place in Johannesburg next month which I will attend alongside the club licensing manager Mr (Weston) Mabhande and its purpose is to ensure that we add more fuel to this thrust but we believe that this is a good start for Zimbabwean football and beyond this we should not be talking of laid back type of management that has been haunting our game for a long time,” said Mashingaidze.