FOREIGN PLAYERS IN ZAMBIA

THE

Football association of Zambia (FAZ) has over 100 registered foreign players in the Zambian super division, for other lower divisions, the number could bd higher. The questions is, what is the effect on the performance of the national team, football development and clubs? We need to clarify here that we are not saying we don’t need foreign players in our Zambian Super Division, we need them BUT it has to be managed well, structured in an efficient way. Currently in the Zambian football league, there are no regulations or laws whatsoever to restrict the number of foreign footballers. A club can register any number of foreign players. The number has increased exponentially for just about less than 15 in 2010 to over 100 in 2020. In 10 years, if not controlled by 2028 it will increase to 200 or more. We also understand clubs want results in the shortest possible time. Therefore, they claim foreign players hit the ground running. But football follows the law of the harvest, no shortcuts. You cannot plant now and two seconds later you harvest, not all. To develop football in Zambia create football academies in all provincial capitals. Lower divisions must have 100 percent local players and super division 92 percent local players and eight percent expatriate players. We disagree with the concept that foreign players improve the local league. This kind of setup just make the league artificially good and effect is average national team performance. Creating a good football team is like “farming.” Prepare the field ie good infrastructure. Plant the seed, football academies, germination. Weeding lower divisions. Maturing of the produce super division. Selling the produce to market, national team. This arrangement of unmanaged foreign players’ acquisition has heavily affected the national team. Get it right people, it’s not the FAZ. NO, it is the setup of the league. The good news this can easily be changed and managed well. For example who is the central defender at Nkana, Zesco, Forest, Power, Zanaco, Lusaka Dynamos, Buildcon, your answer is………so who going to take up that role at the national team? With this you get a third rated player to go to the national team. Results? You know - Miss two consecutive AFCON editions. Please we repeat, we do need foreign players but what we need is control and manage the system, it is that elephant in the room. HOW can we do it? The quota system can apply here. If a club can have any number of foreign players, say a million are registered at the club, but they can only feature three foreign players in their starting line-up. The other way is the grading system. Currently, FIFA has a ranking according to the performance of a national team. If say for example club P want to register a foreign player, one condition would be, he should come from the country whose FIFA ranking is higher than Zambia i.e. is to say if Zambia which is ranked 20 in the world should not get the player from the country whose FIFA ranking is number 50. The reason is simple, a high FIFA rated country generally has a good league and quality players. With this arrangement, the Zambian Super Division will attract very good players from outside the country. Clubs will be forced to get quality players and improve the league at the same time local players will be getting good mentally and competition from foreign players. It you recall Botswana had a lot of Zambian players when their league was just in its infancy stage. The national team coach was at one time a Zambian. They planned well, they got the skill from Zambians and slowly reduced the number foreign players in their country. Right now, let’s face it, Zambia cannot beat Botswana the easy way like before. Tables have turned, Botswana is one of the best teams in Southern Africa. The other way to manage this huge influx of foreign players is for FAZ to register a foreign player, the registering club must prove that the player is part of the national team, in his country of origin, in short, is a proven international player. This way the league will have quality players in our league as they play for the national team wherever they are coming from. The Zambian league will have a huge viewership on pay TV across Africa. It will also attract good sponsors from multinational companies. FAZ can introduce very high registration fees for foreign players. To explain it, to register a local player the club pays K100. Registering a foreign player the cost can be K10, 000 and monthly payment of K5, 000 per player active or inactive as long as he is on the club register list at FAZ If this is implemented it will balance the national league, clubs and national team. At the moment, the clubs and the national football team are out of synchronism. It is not well managed in terms of expatriate players and local player ratio. We must mention here that having a lot of foreign players is not a bad system, it has advantages with it. A high number of foreign players tend to improve league competition but weaken the national team. It creates room for match fixing, the case of Kelong King. It is no coincidence that Zambia is struggling to qualify to major tournaments like the Africa Cup. This is a result of the imbalance we create with foreign players and locals. The proportional ratio of expatriate players and local has reached an unacceptable level. This setup tends to favour clubs than the national team. In Zambia it has really not even worked well even with the clubs. Despite having so many of foreign players for the last 12 years no Zambian club has won any international club cup apart from winning the local league. Let’s correct this now by putting in place regulation of foreign players in Zambia. Our concept is this, an expatriate coach with local players.