Why do council-owned teams struggle?
ZIMBABWE has its fair share of council-owned football teams in the Premiership – two to be exact, but at different times over the last few years, we have had three such clubs playing top flight football.
But my heart bleeds when I see how they struggle for survival whether on the pitch or financially regularly and with a certain depressing predictability.
My heart bleeds when we walk into a home match featuring Bulawayo City or Harare City and I find a handful of supporters in the stands.
And while Harare City and Bulawayo City are both still in the premier league, Mutare City has been relegated to playing in Division One in the Eastern Region.
As council-owned teams fight to stay on an even footing as countless other local football clubs continue to struggle with their finances, questions must be asked about how our council-owned clubs can become sustainable and achieve a level of financial independence from the municipalities who own them.
These clubs must be, under normal circumstances, by now divorced from being funded through rate payers’ monies. These clubs need to get to where healthier financial decisions are made.
Today, we should be proposing solutions to the current barriers to growth of fan representation in these football clubs. Barriers include access to finance, obstructive owners of individual football clubs who do not wish to see the growth of anyone else save for their own clubs and the governance of football in general which continues to exclude football supporters from having a meaningful say.
That said, we maybe need to appreciate the importance of these clubs for and within their communities. These clubs were formed with a similar vision – development and growth of football in these three cities. These clubs were formed to make use of the resources such as council-owned amenities like stadiums and youth centres.
These clubs were formed to provide their youths in these communities with an alternative to bigger and sometimes more difficult clubs to play for. If, for example, Bulawayo has 10 youth centres, under the football club’s stewardship, these youth centres could possibly be 10 separate development academies all feeding not just Bulawayo City Football Club but firstly all football clubs and the city and then the rest of the country.
Imagine how many footballers we could develop for the national game! And the same can be said for Harare and Mutare City football clubs! Their vision is development but development cannot be possible without the buy-in of the local communities. We need them to take ownership of these clubs and begin to support them. Without the communities from which these clubs come from, then the vison for development and growth of the game in general will surely be stunted.
All these three clubs come from regions that have traditionally produced quality players and all three have shown they have eye for f inding talent , but this yet to pay off because
developing football players requires a financial muscle, a financial muscle which council- owned teams cannot raise.
And this is
where
the community buy-in comes in – with locals behind these teams, corporates will be forced to have a look at them and begin to partner with them.
At the moment, the corporate world has turned a blind eye to what is easily the biggest market they can use for exposure. I mean, who would not want to partner with a club that has more than one million rate-payers behind it? Who wouldn’t want to partner with a club that can give a corporate access to one million possible customers or clients? It does not take a rocket scientist to work out the math!
My very own Bulawayo City FC would like to wean itself financially from the municipality, but how? How do we do that when our people from Bulawayo do not see the bigger picture which is the development of football in the city.
We are the perfect feeder team in the region yet we are struggling to stay afloat. Where are the people from Bulawayo, Harare and Mutare? Why are they not taking ownership of their teams by backing them? When babies are born, they crawl, breast feed and eventually are weaned off their mothers – this is what council-owned teams aspire for! Not to say people must stop supporting Highlanders or Dynamos or Manica Diamonds, but if they could for the love of the game, go and support their local municipal teams, this would go a long way to ensure their survival.
If these clubs got a buy-in from the community, as well as the parents of junior or development players or spouses of players, stadiums would be filled. Charity begins at home!
If Bulawayo City could help with the continued development of careers of the likes of Warren Dube, Welcome Ndiweni, Ishmael Wadi, Zephaniah Ngodzo among many others who have been a part of this club, how much would it do if the local community backed it and this could be done all the way from under-10 across the whole city? How many players would the club be able to feed into the national football grid if the corporate world decided to back it? And then multiply this three-fold by adding Mutare City and Harare City to the matrix – the number of footballers produced for the nation at large would be just infinite!
Deuteronomy 15:7-8: If anyone is poor among your fellow Israelites in any of the towns of the land the Lord your God is giving you, do not be hardhearted or tightfisted toward them. Rather, be open handed and freely lend them whatever they need.