By Chisomo Phiri

As part of promoting football development in the country,the country’s football governing body through its president Fleetwood Haiya on Thursday March 28,2024 donated 1,000 footballs to Members of Parliament(MPs) to be distributed among their 193 constituencies where each MP will get five footballs.

The donation ceremony was held at Parliament building where the FAM President together with minister of sports Uchizi Mkandawire addressed the MPs on the country’s football development blueprint and how these MPs can align themselves to the FA football programmes.

Speaking after the donation, Haiya urged the law makers to ensure that their constituency football competitions are registered with FAM’s structures.

He pointed out that constituency football competitions play a big role in football development in Malawi, hence the need to regulate them.

“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,” said Haiya.

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.

Receiving the donation on behalf of the parliamentarians,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.

FAM was founded in 1966 as the governing body of football in Malawi and got affiliated to FIFA in 1967, to the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in 1968 and later on to the Council of Southern Africa Football Associations (COSAFA) in 1997.

The association was established in accordance with the Malawi National Council of Sports Act: Chapter 30.10 of the Laws of Malawi.