OPINION: Payment of training rewards is the only way to revive development football in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwean football is suffering from a slow, systemic drought, and the symptoms are hiding in plain sight. We celebrate when a local giant splurges on a seasoned, spent force, or when a well-funded club imports talent from neighbouring countries.

We look at these big-money moves and mistake them for local football’s progress. It is an illusion.

Importing large volumes of talent into the Zimbabwe Premier Soccer League (ZPSL) is not a sign of growth for the Zimbabwean football ecosystem; it is an admission of failure.

For a development-oriented nation like Zimbabwe, where the ultimate dream of every young player is to play in Europe, the true yardstick of success is in exporting players good enough to play in better leagues.

Right now, our export pipeline is drying up because we are starving the very entities that feed it: our grassroots training academies and developmental clubs.

Training compensation and solidarity payments, provided for in global and national Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP), are not bureaucratic bonuses.

They are the literal lifeblood of development football. In a healthy football ecosystem, these FIFA-mandated fees act as a continuous feedback loop.

When a player signs a professional contract or transfers, a financial reward must flow back to the academy or local club that housed, clothed, fed, and trained them between the ages of 12 and 23. This is the taproot of the football.

It is designed to supply junior clubs with the vital nutrients—funding for equipment, better coaching, proper pitches, and travel—required to keep growing and providing shade for the wider football environment.

Without this taproot, development clubs gradually wilt. In Zimbabwe, the current reality is brutal.

Grassroots club owners sacrifice their personal funds to run academies, only for top-tier professional clubs to swoop in and take their best talent for next to nothing, exploiting loose regulatory enforcement and weak contract structures.

This is not a theoretical crisis; it is a documented reality paralysing our best development institutions.

Back in 2019, the renowned Aces Youth Soccer Academy (AYSA)—the stable that produced legends like Knowledge Musona and Khama Billiat—pursued training compensation from Dynamos in vain when Emmanuel Jalai and Jarrison Selemani joined the Glamour Boys. Down in Bulawayo, Ajax Hotspurs has faced similar stagnation, with outstanding claims for players who graduated to Highlanders remaining locked up and unprocessed by the football association.

These incidents represent a systematic failure that leaves dozens of developmental clubs across Zimbabwe empty-handed after years of sacrifice.
Compounding this local failure is the tragic irony of modern administration.

The introduction of FIFA’s integrated online registration systems, meant to create definitive digital player passports, has not helped local development clubs in any tangible way. Because the football association simply refuses to use these digital records to compel top-flight teams to pay, the system remains a useless archive.

This administrative inertia stands in sharp contrast to global trends. As of July 2026, FIFA reported that USD 989 million had been allocated towards the payment of training rewards to development clubs through the FIFA Clearing House (FCH) since its launch in November 2022.

To save local football, ZIFA urgently needs an equivalent domestic clearing house to automate and expedite the processing of these rewards.

The power of this global system is already evident: PE Academy stands as perhaps the only local development club to successfully receive training compensation through the FCH, visualised in the international transfer of Munashe Garan’anga.

When you cut off the nutrients at the bottom, the entire tree eventually dies. We are already witnessing the consequences in our domestic leagues, which show a gross lack of quality, technical proficiency, and tactical discipline.

Top-flight clubs requesting to increase the foreign players quota to eight from five is a clear, undeniable sign that the local supply has depleted.

Because local academies cannot afford to sustain high-level training setups due to unfair regulations, the players graduating into the senior ranks are increasingly raw and under-prepared.

To fix Zimbabwean football, the football association must stop looking at independent academies as rivals or cash cows. Professional clubs must be held strictly accountable through the online registration system to trace and pay training rewards to grassroots teams.

We must protect the investors, the neighbourhood academies, and the community coaches who discover raw gems in high-density suburbs and rural outposts.

If the mother body continues to allow top-flight clubs to harvest where they did not sow, the grassroots pipeline will completely dry up soon. And when the roots die, the rest of the football ecosystem will inevitably follow.

Our national team cannot be made up of players born and trained in the diaspora alone if we are to call ourselves a true football nation.