What FA should do to professionalise Rwandan football

As a follow-up on my past article, Ferwafa need to professionalise local league, I want to delve into what need to do as a country to truly our game.Many Rwandans have expressed desire to consume professional football but how many of us really understand the concept?To some, when clubs participate in an organised league then that is professional football.To some, professional football is TV football while others think that when sponsors bring in money, then we are playing professional football.There are also some who think that as long as players are plying their trade in another country then they are involved in professional football.So what is professional football? In simple language, professional football is the sale of football products and services for a profit. Proceeds from the sales should be more than the expenses.Every human resource in the professional football cycle should be performing their role at a fee.The club owners are businesspeople interested in making money using football clubs; the players, the coaches, the administrators, the sponsors should all be looking at making their money from the game.Football products include players, replica jerseys, merchandise and memorabilia, football club/team branded day-to-day usable products etc while the services include match tickets, subscription fees for TV channels, etc that give the fans (customers) reason to spend their hard earned money.In summary, professional football is about numbers in the stadium and on multimedia.In Rwanda, there is an urgent need to introduce the Professional Club Football Concept,with the overall objective of overhauling the football industry and open another page. (Mind you, let it not be used as a stack in the reverse gear and end up pressing the accelerator harder than rally champion Davite Giancarlo).The project should pull together professionals in football (technically), marketing, PR, Legal, finance, medicine, ICT, media, etc.These professionals should understand that, for example, DSTV works with number, the reason they chose to get involved with Kenya and not Rwanda. Their choice of investment has to be tied to the number of decoders bought and paid for monthly by subscribers.In professional football, institutions are bigger than individuals, and they are allowed time to implement that duties.Local premier league clubs need to create a Rwanda Premier League (RPL) board with a fine mixture of integrity, moral, business etiquette and football that come from outside the clubs/Ferwafa and the board must be independent of the clubs/Ferwafa but report periodically to the shareholders (Clubs and Ferwafa). The board should be able to create a management team, headed by a CEO, for the day-to-day business of the RPL.The staff should be recruited professionally by the Board and give all Rwandans an equal chance to apply. The Club officials should go back to their clubs and throw their weight behind their clubs for growth. Once this structure is in place, with an RPL management created on merit, right from the board to the messenger, the shareholders will rightly demand results. This would be a good platform to discard petty football politics that we are now accustomed to, at the expense of the league.But club officials should not be in the board of the RPL. Otherwise, they will affect the operations of league; it is one of the reasons South African football, with all the resources at its disposal, is not where they should be.The English Premier League Board, the model that we should mimic, does not have any member from clubs. Football in a civilised environment is purely business and is managed as such by technocrats with no more interests other than business-oriented. Naturally, this delivers the desired and expected profits for the owners who barely interfere in the running of the game.Some football clubs in this mould that are toasts of the world football followers are Manchester United , Real Madrid, Arsenal, Barcelona, Chelsea, AC Milan and Bayern Munich – in their world, money is the language. In Africa, we can cite Esperance of Tunisia, and Al Ahly and Zamalek all of Egypt.In Rwanda, unfortunately, the realities are different. Not a single club is managed as a business enterprise they should be. Players hardly get their salaries on time (if they do at all), virtually have no allowances,they always go on strike for unpaid salaries, among others. The only time our players smile is when their club has won a major silverware.It’s about time this game is taken to the public domain and started to be managed as a business.Most importantly, the government should divorce itself from football management for it to be run as a business enterprise by those who know the plots and intrigues of the game.The writer is a journalist with The New Times.

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What FA should do to professionalise Rwandan football