FAM on the right track

During the last decade or more everyone who loves football in this country is saying just one word. Which is we need to over haul Football Association of Maldives (FAM) and to elect a president who has a vision and mission to take the fooball into the next level.

In 2008 Ali Azim became the first ever elected president of the Football Association of Maldives with a healthy support of the member clubs of the governing body and within just two or three years things changed and member clubs started to work against him. As a result we have witnessed many things which we don’t want to see on and off the pitch.

Later on the clubs started to work against Azim and elected Ilham Ahmed as the president of FAM and within just a year member clubs started against him. For sure many things happened against the rules of the Association. As a result majority of the clubs refused to take part in the FAM annual congress on 25th September 2014.

Ilham’s management failed to have the congress later on and as a result the governing body of world football, FIFA has formed a normalisation committee to solve the issues within the federation.

Under the chairmanship of Maldives Olympic Committee’s president Mohamed Shaweed the first news was about the re start of POMIS Cup and re branding the Dhivehi League to Dhivehi Premier League and giving healthy amounts of money to the participating teams in the Dhivehi Premier League.

Normalisation committee is based on a successful businessman, Mohamed Shaweed and the award winning match commissioner, Abdul Hameed Abdul Gafoor and ever green striker Ali Umar and a successful coach, Mohamed Nizam along with a lawyer Faseeh. With these people we all assure that everything is possible in football if we work for the betterment of football.

In the last week of January this year we have witnessed the support of the people of the Maldives for football. Singapore’s LionsXII and Malaysia’s PDRM FA along with New Radiant and Maziya competed in the tournament and we all believe that it was a huge success for the new management of FAM.

Now the question is can they attract the supporters for the newly introduced Dhivehi Premier League? I will say there might be hiccups but they can attract the supporters for most of the games in the local league this year.

It’s now time for the football family to work together to make this happen and move the Maldives football to the next level. Surely if we work with these visions we can achieve this.