By Phillip Zulu
The recent article by Stanley Mutoya in the Sport section of The Herald on the lack of professionalism in our local sporting activities spurred me on to positively join the discourse.
Notwithstanding the fact that I had taken a low key approach on anything related to active sports, as I follow the medical dictates of hibernation and keeping safe by staying indoors, this subject of professionalism brought more pertinent questions about how sporting activities are suffocated by self-induced malpractices and a serious lack of collegial intents from within the rank and file of all practitioners involved in the wider sector.
As aptly described, the word professionalism; devoting the training time necessary to improve on skills to enhance their careers and be remunerated competitively, is necessary. What has driven our beloved sports into oblivion is a combination of lack of both collegial intents and an established environment of professionalism.
Taking a cue from what Mutoya highlighted in terms of individual responsibility on the footballers’ part (Partson Jaure, Method Mwanjali, Archieford Gutu and a host of others out there), it is really disturbing to note that our local systems have failed to enlighten these young men about the realities of modern sport in a very competitive environment that calls for serious behavioural change early in life.
This idea of “chipping in with meagre resources” has been the common practice since time immemorial, but to continue witnessing its proliferation as a daily occurrence has become a cause for concern, and an eyesore of poor professionalism projection on the part of the club officials, agents/managers and regulatory authorities.
The collegial intents of all the practitioners are seriously lacking when local high profile players are always involved in such tragic situations that are career and life-threatening, and the aftermath has been more of the same without any consideration for legal input or consultation.
Our football in Zimbabwe suffers from serious lack of basic knowledge and understanding of how we can best prepare careers of our young players more responsibly in a healthy environment.
Local football should enforce ethical and legal initiatives at the earliest possible opportunity for young players, so that they fully understand the minimum expectations of their representation by club officials and agents/managers locally, or when they leave for foreign football commitments.
Without undoing the shared responsibility of those that chipped in on any such incidents, time has come when common sense tells us that we definitely have to align our football ethos with legal input and engage medical experts to help curb such recklessness.
As an ardent witness to ongoings of our local football, professionalism died when the full responsibility to learn something intently disappeared.
The departure from dynamisms of professional projection of sport at all levels in our society and the extreme opportunism that has encroached on football, have hugely impacted on the development of football.
Our athletes rarely engage in any form of academic study or scholarly researches informing their careers, hence this upsurge of the same incidents that are career and life-threatening.
Accidents will always occur in everyday life, but when a controlled behaviour has been cultivated over the years, surely we will start to witness less of the same.
This lack of a desire to learn intently the scholarly works of one’s sporting career, is not only a common phenomena of local players, but is a culture among all Zimbabwean players who played abroad as well.
Without mentioning names, how many such high profile players who plied their trades in top professional leagues in Europe bothered to enrol in a coaching course or any other field of study related to sport?
That is the sad truth of our sport as we witness a serious desertion on the learning front. Zimbabwe has some of the most decorated former professional athletes in Europe, and yet when it comes to the dynamisms of professionalism, we are the worst.
Recently, Cameroonian football legend Samuel Eto’o enrolled to study at a top college in the US and vowed that he will one day come back to manage Spanish giants Barcelona, something that is a taboo with our former players who are masters of fault-finding, with some even engaging in delusional stunts at stadiums demanding respect when they could have easily entered as VIPs.
Our football has suffered so much with the same players not even moving an inch to replicate how they were trained in those top clubs by setting up junior programmes for disadvantaged kids in their neighbourhoods where they started their journeys into top-flight football.
A good example is Abedi Pele, the Ghanaian legend who chose to set up his own academy after retiring from European leagues and enrolled his two kids (Jordan and Andre) among local disadvantaged children who massively benefited from his exposure, expert knowledge and good coaching that he was professionally taught from a tender age, hence the professionalism that we witness when his two boys are playing both for their clubs in England or for Ghana.
The links that Abedi Pele established while playing abroad never deserted him nor deliberately blocked his fledging academy which has so far produced more than five national players for Ghana. That is what we call professionalism; when we begin to value ethics of good workmanship, projection of competence and dynamic injection of honesty and self-regulation, as a minimum expectation of good intentions.
On this front, Zimbabweans are way behind and everyday Bantu Rovers and Aces Youth Academy come to mind, one has to applaud the efforts hugely undertaken.
Methembe Ndlovu and Nigel Munyati are nowhere near the bracket of top former professional footballers who played in highly lucrative leagues, yet they saw the need to instil professionalism from tender ages into the multitudes of the disadvantaged children in our neighbourhoods.
Visiting the Aces Youth Academy premises brings forth a rare sense of intent on the part of very few proponents of professionalism on the local football scene.
How many of those former professional players have used their former links and establishments to further the cause of the young talented disadvantaged folks in our local leagues or in the diaspora? Professionalism discourse cannot be engaged outside the fullness of such high profile flaws of our pioneering legends who have disowned their own fellow citizens and responsibilities.
West Africans have shown us how best it can be done, yet Zimbabwe has been at the forefront of producing players who played in Portugal way back in the late 1960s, Greece in the 1970s, England in the early 1980s, Belgium and other eastern European leagues, respectively.
This is just an observation that is not directly intended to attack any such former players, but just a contribution towards broadening the professionalism discourse being flighted in The Herald. The Herald
