By S. Siapha Mulbah
The 2024/2025 national league season under the Liberia football Association is currently running it’s second phase without an official sponsor due to Orange Liberia pullout from the competition for reported political interferences.
The League season started last October with first and second divisions. Later, the women upper league started with all stakeholders at the time hoping that the Global System Mobile Communications (GSM) company will renew its involvement in the competition.
Making the disclosure recently at the football house was LFA’s President Mustapha Raji, who intimated that the last sponsor of the national league decided to bid goodbye to their role because they were heavily criticized for running agreements under conflict of interest with the LFA leadership.
According to him, since their company pullout from the league before the current football campaign, the football governing body of the country is now running football administration from fundings raised from FIFA under its support mechanism.
The lack of sponsor for the competition has now come in a space of uprising concerns that pundits considered may become an impediment to the league.
Some team administrators see this situation as a challenge that will subsequently cut down the financial benefits that their clubs are to receive during the different phases of the payment from the football house.
In relations to the situation, the LFA boss disclosed that sponsorship is not a requirement to run the competition, adding that with or without and official sponsor, the competition will go on while the LFA administration continues to seek new opportunities.
According to him, there’s no statutory obligation on the part of the FA that there must be a sponsor for the competition which defines their role as administrators of the game on the general governance of the game.
“There is no sponsor for the league because the only one we had was Orange Liberia and some of you accused us of being conflicted. We as the football association can assure you that we are engaging other partners to get involve as additional supporters for member clubs but it is not an obligation,” he said.
At the same time, Raji called on the stakeholders to prioritize running their respective clubs as attractive business venture so that they can be able to get interested entities landing support to help with the financial assistances rendered by the Liberia Football Association.
He however clarified that Orange Liberia is still the title sponsor of the Orange Cup which is in full swing. The company is accordingly providing a total of U$56,000 which is used to reward the Champions of the first and second division along with the upper women’s league.
“Teams are under obligation to seek individual sponsorship by running football as a business. I got into football in 1995 and up to 2010 there were no sponsor, so running football as a business we are responsible to attract sponsors to our club,” Raji recalled.
Meanwhile, the LFA has reaffirmed that they will only do business while searching sponsors for the league with legitimate institutions under the Liberian laws that are involved into legal operations.
He called on interested businesses to look into the directions of the LFA to sponsor football as apart of their social cooperate responsibilities to the country developmental agenda with attention of youth recreation and sports intervention.
It can be recalled that the New Energy Electric Vehicle reportedly got attracted to sponsoring the national league as a possible replacement to Orange Liberia that has spent a little while with the competition.
When this report got the attention of the football house in 2024, president Raji and those in charge of discussing sponsorship for the league then questioned the eligibility of the company due to a review of the records of its Chief Executive Officer, Cassell Anthony Kouh.
Raji made it cleared that Kouh records from a jailed sentenced in the United States of America automatically rendered his company illegal to have a bossiness deal with the Football Association.
