Dear Editor,
As the Secretary of the Fruta Conquerors Football Club, I have observed a worrying trend among senior football players who ply their trade within the Georgetown Football Association. This has to do with the personal and educational development among our players and how gullible they have become to any ‘lick and a promise.’ With the exception of just a few, not many clubs have the financial resources to pay stipends (not salaries) to their players that would serve as an enticement for them to remain with their clubs. For example, let’s say that a club has a pool of twenty-five senior players in training and they decide to offer a stipend of $20,000 monthly to each player at the end of twelve months. That club would then have had to find the sum of $6,000,000 to cover that bill, which I may add does not include the cost of coaches, etc. Football still remains an amateur sport in Guyana, with most players just playing for the love of the game; however it does not have to remain this way.
But until the powers that be are able to convince major business entities to make space on their payrolls to accommodate such an activity, or we are able to acquire major sponsorship from the Nike’s, the Adidas’s or the Puma’s, football will remain what it is, an amateur sport.
What we can do as administrators of the sport, is to encourage all the young men whom we encounter daily to take in their education. Too many of them are unable to grasp at the scholarships and other programmes that are available because of their academic backgrounds.
There is no substitute for a sound education; it is priceless, and there is life after soccer. Too many of us who are educated continue to deceive and manipulate the minds of these players; the least we owe them is some form of honesty and good human advice.
Yours faithfully,
Daniel Thomas
Secretary
Fruta Conquerors FC
