Football Association of Malawi (FAM) claims to have spent almost K20 million towards administering the Presidential Cup.
FAM general secretary Suzgo Nyirenda said due to the continued rise in the cost of living, it is becoming increasingly difficult to run the national competition which has remained at K60 million since its inception in 2009.
“It has been very tough to run the competition, particularly this year in which we had to stretch our resources to cater for some logistics such as refereeing, equipment and administration. We also had to provide balls,” he said.
take its toll on FAM
Nyirenda said about K5 million of the money, came from gate collections
“Going forward, we are seriously considering, scraping the national phase that it should be restricted to developmental competitions such as youth, rural, beach soccer and women so that it meets its core objective of talent identification.
“This means the national phase could be scraped off as suggested before. But that will be looked into by the competitions subcommittee when it meets to review the tournament after the national finals scheduled for July 16,” he said.
Malawi National Council of Sports (MNCS) executive secretary George Jana said the proposal would be welcome.
“In fact, that is the idea around the Presidential Initiative on Sports [PIS] as it is supposed to be a developmental programme in all areas of sport,” he said.
Earlier this year, Jana told The Nation that they had proposed to the Ministry of Sports and Culture, to, among other things, exclude Super League clubs so that much of the resources should benefit grass roots football.
However, the reforms were deferred because, according to Jana, council did not have time to enforce the changes. n
