President of the Football Association of Malawi, Today, Fleetwood Haiya, recently emphasized the importance of Members of Parliament in ensuring that their local football competitions are officially registered with the Association.
Haiya delivered this message at the Parliament in Lilongwe, discussing the nation’s football development plan and how MPs can integrate with FA football initiatives. As part of the interaction, Haiya generously provided 1,000 footballs to the legislators, with each Member of Parliament slated to receive five footballs for distribution within their respective 193 constituencies.
Highlighting the significant role of constituency football competitions in Malawi’s football development, Haiya stressed the necessity of their regulation.
“As MPs, your collective efforts and investment in sponsoring football competitions in every corner of the country is phenomenal. Thus, we appreciate your commitment to helping the development of football in the country.”
“However, most of the constituency competitions are not regulated, and we request that each one of you should register their competitions with our structures.”
“This will enable us to provide necessary technical support such as equipment and capacity building for coaches, referees, and administrators.”
“We will also be assigning scouts to your competitions to identify players who can be groomed and be given equal opportunity for selection at various levels of our football such as the Super League and national teams,” he said.
For this reason, Haiya asked the MPs to diversify their football sponsorships and incorporate Women and Youth competitions so that the sponsorships fall in line with FAM’s football development focus areas.
“ Women’s football has proved to be of great potential. Unfortunately, there is not much focus in most areas. We do not have many such competitions across the country as the concentration is only on men’s football. There are a lot of good players at youth and women’s football who do not have a platform. Therefore, we encourage Honourable members to introduce these competitions,” he said.
Speaker of Parliament Catherine Gotani Hara thanked Haiya for the gesture and assured FAM that they will comply with the guidance to register their competitions with FAM.
“This is historic for a sitting FAM president to come to Parliament and donate footballs as well as enlighten us on the best practices of managing football competitions at constituency levels.
“We promise FAM that we will engage FA District committees to get guidance on managing competitions. We will also try our best to promote women’s and youth football in our areas,” said Gotani Hara.
