Professional league key to Pakistan football's revival

After nearly a decade of turmoil, Pakistan football has glimmered with hope following the recent elections of the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF). The newly elected leadership, headed by Mohsin Gilani, faces a daunting task: reviving the sport, which has suffered immense damage.

A key challenge for Gilani is deciding the future of the Pakistan Premier Football League (PPFL). Should the PFF stick with the existing league structure or introduce a new format that could potentially benefit Pakistani football? This decision will be crucial in determining the direction of the sport in the country.

During the tenure of former PFF chief and federal minister Makhdoom Faisal Saleh Hayat, the PPFL was held for a decade successively but it did not benefit the country’s football. In this era of commercialism, football is one of the potential sports in Pakistan which could attract sponsors due to its massive fan-following.

The huge interest in the sport was not only seen in the World Cup qualifiers matches in Islamabad when a massive crowd was seen witnessing the games at the Jinnah Stadium housed at the Pakistan Sports Complex, a zone which is not easily accessible for the fans.

Moreover, even in local tournaments in Quetta, Chaman and Karachi huge crowds are usually seen which shows the real potential of the sport.

Players are hungry for football as the sport remained inactive for ten years mostly due to internal conflict and legal disputes. Even FIFA-installed Normalization Committee failed to do anything big for the country’s football during the last five years in office.

Nuktaalso asked PFF NC’s senior official and former PFF Head League Development Shahid Niaz Khokhar about the league.

“The league should not be announced in any haste. The newly-elected PFF should take time, deliberate on various aspects of the product and to discuss whether the model will work or not before announcing it,” Shahid told Nukta in an interview.

“In the last few years several league models were announced by different groups and all were failure. So, I would advise the PFF to think deeply before announcing a league,” Shahid said.

“League is the backbone for football development and it should be such a product which could yield sustainable results,” Shahid said. “Yes, the new body may start with a semi-professional league and it may then go slowly and gradually towards making it purely professional.”

Now the ball is in the court of the newly-elected PFF’s president Mohsin Gilani. He is the man who can provide a proper structure of football to the country which has an immense potential in football.

During the last decade, national footballers faced huge financial issues due to football being inactive in the country. Only once the Premier League was conducted during all these ten years. A complete generation of footballers got wasted and those who were stars in 2015 are now no more in the circuit which is a sad reality.

During all this time players and officials also lost jobs due to closure of several departments.