After a season, where the Castle Lager Premier Soccer League (PSL) went almost without a glitch, the news on the changes to the number of teams to be relegated comes almost as a hammer blow to football followers.
Comment: NewsDay Editor
Zifa and PSL agreed at the beginning of the season to come up with relegation plans and why they want to change these at the 11th hour is quite shocking.
Teams like Tsholotsho and Mutare spent the whole season knowing what they had to do to avoid relegation, but at the stroke of a pen they have all, but been relegated.
What Zifa and PSL need is consistency and that if they make a decision, they must stick with it until the end of the season because this ad hoc approach smacks of a lack of professionalism and is rank amateurish at the least.
Football can never be professionally run in such a manner and needs up to three-year plans and strategies for it to get sponsors, who can project the nature of the mileage they want.
Short termism is the bane of many sectors in Zimbabwe and it seems football is also suffering from this failure to plan and stick to resolutions.
Most of the teams in the bottom half of the league have a right to feel aggrieved because some of them have been dragged into a relegation dogfight they thought they had avoided.
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This means all of a sudden they have to rework their plans and this could be financially costly for them.
Such bungling from the football governing bodies has a domino effect, which may not be felt by PSL and Zifa, but has profound ramifications on the clubs.
PSL can rightfully claim they do not have money to fund the promotion playoffs, but the question we would ask is: Why did they not have the vision and the foresight to predict such a scenario, as leaders naturally should?
Money issues are not new in Zimbabwe and if PSL are committed to funding the playoffs, then they should do just that, as they should have these funds budgeted for.
While at it, it will be also interesting to hear what the logic of the playoffs was in the first place.
A simple process would have been to demote four teams and promote an equal number instead of the approach Zifa and PSL took, which looks unnecessary, cumbersome and complicated.
But since they chose a complex system, changing goalposts at this point is not the solution and only causes confusion.
PSL and Zifa made their beds and now they must lie in them instead of pushing their confusion to the clubs who thought they had done enough to survive relegation.
