A pathy, manipulation and intrigue seem to define Pakistan football. While players and fans of football continue to rue the state of the sport in the country despite its undoubted popularity, the machinations in its governing body, the Pakistan Football Federation (PFF), paint a picture of those at the helm working for their own personal interests rather than for the good of its main stakeholders. But now there seems to be an unholy nexus between such interests and parts of the global football governing body Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) as well.

FIFA has suspended the country twice in the last decade alone — including over interference in the PFF elections. Eventually, the world governing body resorted to a stopgap solution of appointing a “Normalisation Committee” (NC) in 2019. It was given the explicit task to hold the PFF elections transparently, while managing football activities, including conducting regular domestic football tournaments, till the appointment of a new governing board.

But even this stopgap solution has now been mired in controversy, with the NC failing woefully short of meeting its mandate and getting multiple extensions to its tenure along the way.

One major criticism against this stopgap NC is that the man steering it — Pakistani-Canadian tech entrepreneur Haroon Malik — is trying to set up a franchise league, on similar lines as cricket’s glitzy Pakistan Super League, at the expense of a club-based domestic league necessary for the grassroots development of the sport.

This Eos investigation will reveal how Malik is actively trying to engineer a situation that would enable him to continue exerting his influence over the PFF — even after his departure following elections for a new governing body — and how some of the highest-ranking officials in FIFA are part of an elaborate scheme to upend Pakistan football for their own gains.

Everyone agrees that Pakistan football needs a regular league system to provide a platform for local footballers and to capitalise on the growing fan interest in the sport. But is a franchise system like cricket’s PSL the best way forward? And why is an interim football administration pushing for it?

FAR FROM NORMALISED

On a breezy Ramazan night during the second week of March, two football teams took to a ground nestled in the hills to Karachi’s north. There was an extravagant ceremony before the match, with fireworks aplenty. It was the opening match of the Ramazan Gold Cup.

Sights like these have become few and far between in Pakistan football and the PFF had nothing to do with it. This tournament had been organised privately, with domestic football activity having become non-existent in the country.

The Pakistan Premier Football League (PPFL), the country’s top-tier competition, hasn’t been held by the PFF since 2018. It’s something that has irked Pakistan’s history-making head coach Stephen Constantine.

Constantine — who has been demanding that the league be restarted — wasn’t in attendance at the Naya Nazimabad Football Stadium, however. The 61-year-old Englishman was in Lahore, overseeing the national team’s preparations for its upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup qualifier against Jordan.

A day earlier in Lahore, Constantine was visibly irate during an interaction with reporters. Peppered with questions regarding Pakistan’s chances against Jordan — who had recently ended as runners-up in the Asian Cup — the English coach was blunt and unforgiving. Time and again, Constantine has reiterated that it is fundamentally important that Pakistan revives its league structure, which can allow local players to have regular competition.

Since taking up the job in October 2023, Constantine has been adamant that a functioning league would allow him to have a greater pool of local players to choose from, instead of working only with those at his disposal at the training camp. He was merely repeating himself six months on.

He was also critical of the stopgap NC over the delay in organising the National Challenge Cup, an annual month-long football tournament, which was suspended after the group stages in January last year. For him, the tournament could have been a starting point for the league.

“I just heard there were 5,000 clubs in Pakistan,” he said, referring to the results of the recent club scrutiny — disputed at several levels — carried out by the stopgap NC. “You don’t need every district to be part of the league. We had a Challenge Cup with 32 teams. Just take 16 teams from it and start the bloody league.”

What Constantine doesn’t know is that the PFF’s internal problems aren’t the only impediment to the revival and resumption of the domestic league.

More than a year before his appointment as the chairman of the FIFA appointed ‘Normalisation Committee’ in December 2021, Haroon Malik visited the FIFA headquarters in Zurich for a ‘secret meeting’ that would determine the future trajectory of Pakistan football.

GAMING THE SYSTEM

To be fair, Pakistan football suffers from a multitude of problems: from a decades-long power struggle over control of the federation, including a hostile takeover of its premises in 2021 — which resulted in a 15-month suspension of Pakistan by FIFA — to the lack of clarity over whether any future domestic league would be a club or departmental event, or if it would take place at all. This is aside from national team players often going unpaid for months, and the country’s and clubs’ abysmal performance in international competitions.

The PFF has also failed on the administrative front, with elections for the new governing body not held in the three years since Malik was appointed to lead the stopgap NC.

One of the elections conducted by the stopgap NC, for the referee’s association, remains disputed. In another controversial decision, the PFF allowed newly registered clubs the right to vote — against the PFF Constitution — in the ongoing district elections. These clubs were scrutinised as part of PFF’s extensive programme to register clubs, the long-delayed first step towards holding elections. A novel way of voting has also been introduced for the district elections, with votes to be cast through WhatsApp, which has raised further alarm among the footballing........

© Dawn (Magazines)