MD ANWAR ULLAH, Dhaka: Football is going to receive much fanfare with Federation Cup Football tournament starting from the third week of December followed by the biggest show of country’s football the Bangladesh Premier League.
Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) after a discussion in a meeting with the Professional Football League Committee and the stakeholders on Thursday decided to kick off the season from December 19.
Clubs, fans and obviously the players would get rid of confinement if the BFF could execute their plans to resume the 2020-21 season.
Meanwhile, the 2019-2020 season was postponed on March 15 before completion of the first leg of the Bangladesh Premier League. Since then everyone concerned with football were forced to stay at home and all types of activities related to football were closed down due to Covid-19 pandemic.
However, with the green signal from FIFA football has come back to many regions across the globe. The UEFA have already started some of their competitions, the Latin countries started their FIFA World Cup qualifying round matches and the AFC also scheduled the AFC Champions League competition.
The Ministry of the Youth and Sports of Bangladesh also permitted to start the sports activities in the country. Accordingly, the Basketball Federation staged the Bangabandhu Federation Cup, Bangladesh Cricket Board (BCB) is organizing President Cup Cricket tournament while the BFF also started the camp of the national women’s football team ahead of their AFC competitions.
Considering the overall situation, the BFF decided to commence their top-level competitions from December and have also done some home works by selecting six venues in and outside Dhaka, fixing the schedule of the players’ registration, criteria for payments, agreements and the foreign players’ quota.
Amer Khan, one of the debutants in the newly-elected EC committee of the BFF, when talking to the Independent on Thursday said, “If the Covid-19 pandemic will not deteriorate, then we are ready to set off all our football activities with the players’ inter-club transfer from November 1, as we also preliminarily selected six venues including the Bangabandhu National Stadium and some of the venues nearer to the capital to hold the matches.”
“In fact there would be some problems with the foreign players. I am very much confused whether players from different countries will travel here or not in this situation. However, the clubs, who could not manage foreign booters, will have to play with local collections,” said Amer Khan, the former player and the Manager of Brothers Union.
