MBABANE: It has been reliably gathered that the Premier League of Eswatini (PLE) has not claimed the February batch of Eswatini Football Association (EFA) over E300 000 quarterly grant.
This money is received by all the eight EFA affiliates. The PLE get the larger share of the grant as they are regarded as the commercial wing of the country’s football mother body. It was announced recently that the eight members would be getting the July batch of around the same amount two months earlier than expected. They were supposed to get the money in July as per Federation of International Football Association (FIFA) policy as this is part of grant from the world football governing body disbursed to different member associations across the world quarterly every year.
EFA is among the beneficiaries and it was confirmed by the association recently that they were expecting their quarterly grant from FIFA sooner than anticipated in light of the COVID-19 pandemic that has stopped football activities globally. The local football mother body was due to receive the subvention in July but will now come early. This has in turn come as good news for local football entities like PLE who are affiliates of the EFA and benefit from the FIFA grant with the other seven affiliates.
Information gathered by Independent News is that unlike the other members who got their February share, the PLE did not make a claim as the executive committee headed by Peter ‘Touch’ Magagula wanted to discuss this with the Board of Governors first before claiming the money due to the threat of the coronavirus. Unfortunately, the virus struck before the executive committee had the chance to inform the members about the EFA grant and subsequently, football activities were indefinitely suspended locally, leaving the matter hanging.
In short, this means the PLE is due to receive double grant of about E300 000 from the EFA these coming days. The interesting part is that it is expected that the PLE executive will be forced to declare the unclaimed money from EFA as only the July grant of E300 000 was mentioned as money expected from EFA. It has also been established that the PLE Board of Governors (BoGs) will seek clarity on the EFA grant during their special meeting on Wednesday where a lot of other issues will be discussed.
It is also worth noting that the PLE executive was recently served with a petition by 18 elite league teams to call an urgent meeting within 14 days where they want some issues included in the agenda apart from the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on local premier league football and what teams think should happen to the current season in view of the virus.
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