Moorosi Tsiane
LIOLI president Lebohang Thotanyana on Thursday elected the chairperson of the Premier League Chairpersons’ Forum.
Thotanyana told the Lesotho Times this week that his team’s immediate task is to restructure and reorganise the Premier League Management Committee (PLMC) and help it improve football.
“The PLMC looks like it has reached its ceiling in terms of fostering improvement of football and requires a little shack-up for us to move forward,” Thotanyana said.
“We must also foster relations between all the 16 premier league teams.
“As the forum, we are the watch dogs and must play an oversight to see that our policies are put to action. In the past, since we didn’t have a secretariat in the PLMC, the forum wasn’t fully utilised and that must change.
“We are supposed to come up with an action plan and give it to the PLMC to implement. The league’s chairperson is our secretary and will always keep us up to speed in terms of their developments,”
Among the immediate tasks is the fight to resume soccer activities.
“For now, the most important thing we should be focusing on is resuming so we have already asked LeFA to write to NACOSEC and ask them to relax the restrictions they imposed because as things stand, no team can afford that. We are already losing lots of money by paying players when there is no revenue being generated.
“It is going to be expensive to keep teams in camp and do regular testing while at the same time our source of income (gate takings) wouldn’t be viable because supporters are still not allowed into the stadiums.
“We are in a tricky situation because several players’ contracts are ending between May and June, so it must be clear what is happening. We have also tasked the PLMC to engage the sponsors (Vodacom). They have a clause which says they can only give out money if 90 percent of the matches have been played while the premier league regulations say 75 percent but we are saying now the circumstances are different and we ask that just for this season, they relax such clauses.
“We are proposing that at least it should be 60 percent of the matches that have to be played before they can release the funds because as things stand, we might not even complete the season,” Thotanyana said.
