I am slowly and worryingly picking signs of a brewing storm within the corridors of the Namibia Football Association (NFA) Football House, especially in the department of the Namibia Premier Football League (NPFL).
The past couple of months have seen a growing trend in clubs advancing all
sorts of requests and excuses not to honour their league fixtures.
Many a time, those requests and
excuses are advanced to the NFA in the eleventh hour and makes it very hard for the league and the FA to put contingency plans in motion.
It is now becoming clear, despite the denial by most club chairpersons, that teams are struggling financially to honour their league obligations and many have been complaining that the monthly
league grant to clubs is not enough to cater for all their expenses.
But it is what it; the NPFL or the NFA cannot give what they don’t have. I have said it before and I will say it again, local clubs should sober up from the misplaced habit of wanting to be spoon fed everything by the
league and the FA.
If both the NPFL and NFA are only able to provide the current grants to the clubs, then that purely means that is what their financial muscles are able to withstand at this point in time. As said, they can’t give what they don’t have.
It then becomes the sole responsibility of the clubs to think out of the box and create other additional income streams for themselves, to avoid being wholly dependent on the NPFL and
NFA. They (clubs) need to start looking inwards for solutions and survival.
The days of clubs roaming the corridors of Football House with begging bowls and irrational demands are over. Clubs need to become self-sufficient.
If this situation is allowed to continue unabated, the NPFL and NFA will soon face an unwanted scenario where clubs will start coming up with all sorts excuses to deliberately frustrate league proceedings weekend in and weekend out.
It is becoming clear that very soon a certain group of financially frustrated clubs will start putting up a united front against the NPFL and NFA to ensure that league proceedings are disrupted until their demands for more money are met.
If further left unchallenged, those very same clubs will proceed to engage in
other dirty tactics to ensure that the league is eventually collapsed and football comes to a halt again.
Mark my words, I have been reading between the lines for the past few
months and I’m seeing all the infamous hallmarks of the outmoded Progressive Forces at play here.
I must hasten to warn both the NPFL’s director Mabos Vries and NFA/Fifa Normalisation Committee members not to loosen their grip on the small progress our football has made so far. The
Normalisation Committee should not allow another ‘Progressive Forces’
situation to manifest itself.
The NPFL and NFA sole mandates are to provide platforms and environments where football will be played and I think they have managed to do so under very difficult circumstances.
Any unreasonable demand beyond that becomes the direct responsibility of the clubs and both the NPFL and NFA should begin to make that very clear to the clubs, otherwise the situation of some clubs feeling like they are the only chosen ones will go out of hand.
Until next time, sharp sharp!!