Africa-Press – Lesotho. Last week the Lesotho Football Association (LEFA) presented its four-year vision named the ‘New Dawn’ for the first time in a newly-formed newsletter.
LEFA’s new manifesto comes as football across the globe tries to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic which has radically changed the game from its administration, how it is watched to its economics.
LEFA’s secretary general, Mokhosi Mohapi, unpacked what LEFA’s new vision entails and the goals the association expects to achieve by its target year of 2024.
In a newly-launched LEFA newsletter, Mohapi said the New Dawn is about managing football from a “very exciting perspective” and hopefully “re-rerouting past failures into more success-oriented perspective.
” There are five main pillars in the New Dawn – Governance and Administration, Technical Development, Competitions, National Teams and Infrastructure.
Mohapi says this new vision addresses LEFA’s existence within the challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic and other socio-political perspectives.
It sets a roadmap which the association will use to navigate Lesotho football during and beyond the pandemic and it also touches on how LEFA plans to achieve its mandate of developing, regulating and promoting football.
“The Lesotho Football Association hopes to do a 360-degree based approach to turn around the fortunes of LEFA from an internal and external perspective,” Mohapi told LEFA’s newsletter.
“You will be aware the organization lacks success at the moment, and this has to change and change now.
” Mohapi said this new vision was a collective decision.
Under the competitions section, the association plans to repackage the country’s top two football leagues – the Premier League and First Division – and transition from their current amateur status to semi-professionalisation within two seasons.
LEFA also seeks to enforce stricter club licensing while providing training for club bosses in the field of modern club management. The association will retrain referees to service the semi-professionalisation process while also providing stimulation resources to support the process.
In addition, current sponsorship deals will be renegotiated in order to make elite football leagues more competitive and yield a better return on investment on the part of the teams. The association plans to restructure and modernise the technical staffs of Lesotho’s national teams in order to meet today’s challenges.
It will inculcate modern sport science principles and practices in order to create more competitive national teams and it also aims to have national teams reaching major competitions semi-finals during the coming four years.
LEFA says the future is about the new normal and it requires a “phenomenal change to the way football is to be managed. ” It calls for experienced and dynamic visionaries to lead organisations.
It says this new dispensation is about catching up with the rest of the world using resources available to the association, human, financial and technological.
The technical development looks at youth and grassroots, licensing for private academies and establishing a national academy programme. More youth and women’s coaches will be trained.
LEFA aims to train former footballers and referees in business skills in order to empower them to be able to survive in life after active football. It will also seek to honour and reward those who played a role in the football fraternity with dedication, devotion and passion in the past and currently.
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