PRESIDENT’S CORNER: Olympic Dream Still Within Sight

Football felicitations to you the followers of the beautiful game. It is such an important season in our game as the Copper Queens are in Rabat for the second leg of the final qualifying round of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Our Zambia Futsal National Team is in Rabat too for the TotalEnergies Africa Cup of Nations. The Copper Queens trail 2-1 from the home tie and need to overturn that scoreline to book their ticket to the Olympics.

We are not leaving any stone unturned in ensuring that the team focuses on the monumental tie on Tuesday and made sure that they traveled by charter into Rabat and have already settled. Our focus for now is one hundred percent on ensuring that the team remains fully engaged on the assignment at hand. Given how valiantly the Copper Queens fought on Friday, we have every reason to believe that they will overturn the deficit. Considering that there is no away goals rule for this tournament, it re-enforces our belief that we have a very good chance to punch our ticket to Paris.

We are grateful for the support from the fans that filled up the Levy Mwanawasa Stadium on Friday in Ndola. We still feel their positive energy even on foreign soil and will be counting on their positive energy as we seek to seal our qualification. The Copper Queens have been down this road before and done extremely well on foreign soil.

Away from the Copper Queens Olympic chase, we have our futsal national team that is in Rabat for the Africa Cup of Nations. It is always good to see our national teams participating at international events like this and we have no doubt that they will fly our flag with pride. Having negotiated their way through a tough and tense qualification process, we believe that they are motivated enough to count themselves among the hopefuls for the world cup.

Top three teams at the AFCON will automatically qualify for the world cup. The qualification to the AFCON will help reinvigorate our drive to spread the growth of futsal across the country. It inevitably requires a huge investment especially with infrastructure. However, given the huge potential shown we will be looking at ways to build on this momentum.

Finally, we sign off from Solwezi where we held the seventh provincial annual general meeting which is yet another constitutional fulfilment. The successful assemblies take us closer to the April 27 annual general meeting which will be held in Lusaka. We are remaining with three provinces to wind up ahead of the AGM. We truly value the interaction with the membership that are the lifeblood of our game. Sometimes listening to outsiders, gives the impression that this year’s congress is elective. We are consoled by the fact that the membership are fully conscious of this year’s AGM being non elective and are dealing with typically developmental matters. We have spent quite a lot of time in appraising our membership with the ins and outs of our constitution which is FIFA aligned. It goes without saying that the FAZ constitution is a mirror of the FIFA statutes.

Thankfully we have sustained our impeccable record of availing the membership all the requisite documents including the financials within the constitutional time frame. We are happy with the healthy debate preceding the AGM although understandably the membership will duly have their usual say at the assembly.

Credit: FAZ Media