We have decided to share our knowledge and experience with the society after our interaction with a lot people both formally and informally about the real solution to football and the development of football as a product. We have worked with many companies, organisations and clubs and through our work experience we came across so many issues which are impossible to discuss all at once here because of limited space. We will give our best to summarise the issues and offer the real solution to the development of football as a product.
What issues are urgent and need attention?
Leadership
Leadership is not measured by the wealth accumulated, the popularity and charitable activities that have been achieved. Real leadership measurement is the ability to assess, quantify, monitor, development of solution-based intervention strategies.
Leadership Failures
Our case in Botswana is total crisis; the drought of leadership failure we witness every day calls for urgent introspection and decisive action. We will give two examples to illustrate our point.
Most Premier League and lower league clubs in Botswana are insolvent and yet they are allowed to continue accruing debts which they will never pay because of their position. The question to ask is who really benefits from this saga because we know players employed by these clubs who are casualties of this insolvency. The only logical answer to this puzzle is the quality of leadership we outlined above which describes the attributes required from a Leader. The second question is how long these clubs will be allowed to secure services from different suppliers yet they don’t have finances to pay their debts. It is well known that procurement of goods and services without finances is an offence. The real solution to this problem is first to do an in-depth analysis of the attributes of leadership and insist on a month to month performance evaluation on leadership. Clubs in Botswana can have a long-term strategy to mitigate this insolvency by doing a due diligence on the viability of the clubs and also use the other option of Pool Strategy that means clubs merging and the development of a long-term strategy for revenue generation.
Sponsorship
We have decided not to give the usual definition of sponsorship; we opted for a practical definition to make our point more relevant to the issues we are discussing about sponsorship. Sponsorship is an investment done by different parties to achieve set deliverable goals and the exploitation of each party platform to maximise value. Botswana does not have a sponsorship framework or any ambition to develop a fully fledge industry because those given responsibilities are pre-occupied with their own interest instead of seeing the bigger picture for the country. All donations made in Botswana which by mistake are called sponsorships do not meet the criteria for sponsorships attributes. Sponsorships should have clear task given to all parties to participate and the development of products and services that have to drive those sponsorships. All sponsorships should have valuations and proper mechanism of monitoring, performance and evaluation done on monthly basis.
Finally, leaders should never be allowed to pursue their personal goals at the expense of the beautiful game and leaders should never be appointed based on their status in the society. We welcome business leaders in football who have good leadership attributes we have outlined above. We need results badly, the time of talking and doing nothing is over, the time is now for football to take its right place in Botswana as one of the performing product.
Gibson Matenge
Billionaire Consortium
The tragedy of football in Botswana
