GFA Trims Staff

The interim committee of the Gambia Football Association has laid-off 34 staff of the country’s umbrella football governing body.

The move came in hot heels of World football governing body, Fifa’s announcement that it would suspend its subventions to the GFA, as the football association did not meet its required terms.

The interim committee is grappling with a huge debt it inherited from the dissolved executive, and as a result, it owed the workers four-month salary arrears before paying the staff recently.

The swift move by the cash-strapped association affects security guards, cleaners, cooks gardeners and auxiliary staff. Only forty-one staff out of the initial seventy-five has been maintained.

The dispatch from GFA reads in full as follows:

“The Normalization Committee takes this opportunity to thank the affected staff for their untiring and unreserved dedication to football and for their unwavering commitment to the cause of developing Gambian football. The committee further reassures the general public of its resolve to restructuring and standardizing the scope of Gambian football in collaboration with the Ministry of Youth and Sports” a statement from the soccer association read.

It continued. “This exercise came after the end of the staff audit carried out by the Normalization Committee. Cognizance of the huge debt amounting to eight million dalasi inherited from the former GFA Exercutive, the interim body meticulously concludes that maintaining a staff of 75 is not sustainable and therefore arrived at this decision to retrench thirty-four staff of the Gambia Football Association.

The dispatch also reveals that in future, appointed coaches will be drafted on contract basis.