EDITORIAL COMMENT: Football should swim out of murky waters

FOOTBALL is the most popular sport in Zimbabwe, both in terms of participation and following, so we should all expect that it will attract the best administrators, garner the most sponsorship and reach higher international rankings than any other sport.

And none of that is so.

The decision by the Sports and Recreation Commission on Monday to use its powers under the law to suspend the Zifa board and recommend that the Minister of Youth, Sport, Arts and Recreation appoint an interim board, while the whole process of restructuring the administration and sorting out the problems is put in motion.

While the commission did, learning from its lesson when it suspended the controlling body for Zimbabwe Cricket, consult widely if secretly with the Government, which appears to have given full backing for the reforms, and with Fifa, the international controlling body. The move does open the risk that Fifa will refuse to recognise the drastic move and will bar Zimbabwean teams from international competition.

But we have already seen that in the case of Kenya, which did the same a week earlier, that Fifa is ready to listen before deciding if it will take action and if so what action. Fifa should understand that sometimes drastic action is needed. After all it was not that long ago that the employees in the Fifa headquarters had the edifying sight of a large chunk of the top brass leaving the building in handcuffs and under arrest.

Admittedly no one then tried to replace Fifa, which was expected to sort itself out, and admittedly the SRC simply suspended Zifa’s board, rather than urging the police to come in and arrest the members, but there was still a break down in administration.

But even if Fifa does temporarily bar Zimbabwe, the actual effect will be modest. Zimbabwe has been participating and losing.

A lot of money was spent hiring a national coach who appeared to be deficient, spending a lot of money in flying teams to away games so they could lose, spending a lot of money putting up the visiting and winning teams for our home games in five-star hotels, and flying foreign based players to and from the games.

So if we are sidelined for a while there will not be much to lose.

Football in Zimbabwe is not in a hopeless position. While few sponsors want to pump money into Zifa itself, there is a lot of sponsorship into club teams.

A majority of the premiership teams are backed by corporates, and when the financial affairs and basic administration are done by the sort of people who have the skills and integrity to manage very large companies this is obviously done well.

As you move down the line there is still a lot of business backing. Many teams in the lower levels are drawn from companies or branches of companies.

At the bottom this might just be kit, transport and lunches at the match, but again there is support and branch finance managers overseeing the spending.

Even pure club teams are not badly managed, since the players have a very good idea of what money flows in and out and ensure that a decent set of books is kept.

There are some dedicated administrators and others, such as referees, who certainly meet the standards and who put in the time and effort required to run the game; if they were not there the whole show would have totally collapsed.

But as the Sports Commission noted, as you move up the line a lot of poor practices and inadequate administration takes over.

Elections are quite often manipulated, to choose a neutral word and there have been reports and allegations for years that some winners of elections in effect buy support and buy votes.

This does produce a top layer of administration that has a low level of trust, both in their efficiency and ability, and in some minds in their integrity.

Hiring a national coach is one prime example, and it is difficult to understand what checks were done when hiring our last foreign coach for example. The money we were prepared to pay should have produced someone far better.

One of the more interesting moves by the Sports Commission is that it is willing to see the Zimbabwean soccer community do the heavy lifting in the necessary changes and reforms.

The commission wants to remove the dead hand at the top, and ensure that the process of cleaning up the administration right down the line is done properly, but is not doing the actual work itself.

Even the interim executive that still has to be appointed is precisely that, a temporary body of sober people whose prime job will be to help the soccer community find and push forward a group of people who can run soccer properly, efficiently and honestly.

Such people must exist and the job of the community as a whole must be to find them and elect them.

Sports administration, especially of a major national association, is neither simple nor easy. Many of the required skills and processes are similar to those required in other areas of life. Major companies go to a lot of trouble to find people who are fit to run the show, and the same sort of approach is needed in sport.

Being on the Zifa board might bring a lot of status, but that status needs to be earned.

Those who do the electing, right from the base level when electors are elected, need to remember they are looking for the best; the votes should not be a popularity contest or an exercise of people scratching each others’ backs.

In the end, as with all sports, it is those involved who will have to push forward the reforms and find the right people to run the sport. The Sports Commission can clear the field, as it is doing, but it is there to ensure that sports associations are run properly not to run them.

The administrative deficiencies in Zimbabwean soccer were good grounds for intervention, but now it is up to the whole soccer community to put egos and status-seeking aside and start rebuilding the structures so the right people are running the game.

The reform process can be long or short, but if everyone puts in the required effort it need not take forever.

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