25 Apr 2016

 Botswana Football Association president, Tebogo Sebego has commended FIFA’s efforts of improving football in Africa by conducting a two-day FIFA connect programme in Gaborone. 

The consultative meeting was in regard to a data programme tool used to register players and football officials, which the FIFA delegates engaged Southern Africa federations on how to incorporate and link into their own. 

Addressing the media during the opening of the workshop, Sebego said football in Africa was growing and that as it grows it presents a lot of challenges. 

He said part of the challenge come from the database that football administrators have in respect of players and officials. 

Sebego further said as FIFA was trying to find solutions, he advised delegates of federations to create initiatives to insure that when FIFA comes they would be able to coordinate whatever effort FIFA was making with their own. “A lot of us are going through player registration challenges as we do not know where the players started their history, it is not at the tip of our fingers and such programmes are meant to alleviate that problem and insure that we have a complete history of all the players in our leagues that are moving from country to another,” he said 

He advised them to share with other federation members after the training and ensure the player’s registration challenge faced by Africa was alleviated in one way or another. 

He said Africa had always had a problem when it comes to transfers of players information as it was lacking. He added that the system was not up to scratch with giving certainty of registration. 

“This is part of the initiative that are meant to help Africa to be empowered,” he said. 

He also said proper recording keeping and data management goes without saying that football in Africa has reached a stage that needs to have information about ourselves and with every little detail that they do. 

He said FIFA has taken a lead in ensuring that it keeps its history and database that everything that have to do about them was well documented and properly packaged. 

Sebego said this was what was needed to be done by African federations, saying the training was meant specifically to empower them to grow football in Africa. 

For his part, FIFA representative, Zeikiffi Ngoufonje said the system was an important tool because Africa had a lot of challenges with tracing young players and those departing the continent and those based overseas. 

“We cannot trace them, we cannot trace where they started to play so this means clubs are losing the income that they should be making when those players are being transferred,” he said. 

He said the registration allows the federation to have data which could be used for marketing purposes about how to increase the income for member association. 

Ngoufonje said through consultative the discussion would be about how to adapt the platform to suit each federation’s system. 

He noted that the platform was flexible, as some tools could be added into the platform. 

He also said the tool was not a competition management tool. However, he said those who were interested in developing some competition management tool, the platform was flexible enough to accommodate such. 

Furthermore, he said the objective of the training was to show what the platform was all about and how we could use it, adding that support was available for members from Zurich or the region 

“The idea is to increase our presence in terms of support at regional level,” he said. ENDS