Zifa executive holds maiden indaba

THE newly appointed Zifa excecutive committee held its first board meeting in Harare with issues of football development of the men and women's game as well as the preparations for the Warriors' final 2019 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier in March taking centre stage.

Addressing a press briefing at a local hotel after the meeting yesterday Zifa president Felton Kamambo said the thrust of the new board was on reviving the country's once thriving development structures as well as tapping into the potential of the Warriors brand to generate revenue.

"We had our first board meeting today and all board members were present, we discussed quite a number of issues but our main thrust is mainly on the development of our team, particularly Futsal, beach soccer, women's soccer and men's football," Kamambo said.

"What we have done is that next year we are going to introduce junior leagues for both men and women. On the women's side our target is to have a fully-fledged women's premier league and some regional leagues also for women while at the same time having junior leagues at regional level," he said.

Kamambo revealed plans to partner the Premier Soccer League in reviving junior football leagues while also breathing new life to existing structures, which had been left to die by the previous Zifa boards.

"For the men we have engaged the leaders of the disbanded junior football leagues, there are structures that are there already. So the board member concerned is going to make sure we have junior leagues running starting next year. For starters we will have junior leagues running in all provinces and then at the same time we are also going to engage PSL clubs to come up with junior teams that will participate in junior leagues in their respective provinces," he said.

"We will make sure that the affiliation fees that PSL pays to Zifa will be ploughed back into junior leagues."

On the Warriors, Kamambo said the new board had come up with various strategies, which will see the national side being turned into a commercial entity capable of generating significant revenue to finance its activities.

This will see match tickets for the Warriors' final Afcon qualifier against Congo in March going on sale next month while a tender process is also being put in place for the team's kit.

"As far as the Afcon qualifier is concerned we have said we want to treat everything about the national team as a commercial entity. We want to improve on our preparations, so our tickets for the national team for the game that we will play in March will go on sale at the beginning of January….We also introduce membership cards, which we will call national team membership cards that fans can use to watch matches …, our aim in all this is to raise money in advance and that will allow us to plan ahead," he said.

Kamambo added: "Still on that game, there are a number of institutions and individuals who want to sponsor our kit but we have set some conditions on the people we want to engage. Our brand is very good we don't want it to go very cheap so we have set some benchmarks and anyone who can meet the set standard we will then give him the tender to supply national team kit and replicas. We also want to play a number of friendlies, we don't want to compete to lose but to win," he said.

The newly-appointed Zifa board yesterday resolved to lift the suspensions of individuals who had been summarily banned from all football activities by the previous board led by Philip Chiyangwa.

Kamambo, who was elected the new Zifa boss, last Sunday, headlines the list of football administrators and officials who had been victims of the arbitrary suspensions meted out by the previous Zia board.