His strength is that he has passion for the sport. He has played football; he has been a coach though at a lower level and prior to joining the BFA, he was Botswana National Sports Council (BNSC) officer in -charge of football.
Ntshinogang says his immediate assignment is to see to it that the secretariat has enough staff. This will enable the BFA to focus and do its job. He says the chief executive cannot do everything by himself. “We need the marketing and communications wing to be up and running as well as the competitions wing to focus mainly on our competitions.”
The clubs will also get his attention. He says at the moment, clubs are not well organised. He believes that the association can portray a good image through the clubs. “Clubs are the mirror of the association,” he adds. He says that for as long as the state of local football does not improve, dreams of going professional are far-fetched. Helping clubs is not all about money. Ntshinogang says clubs need to find ways of running themselves well. He says in some instances, clubs do not prioritise on the meagre resources they have. He advises that the clubs, especially First Division and Super League ones should have offices to run their affairs.
Ntshinogang points out that local football needs to be sold to the outside world and he suggests that the BFA needs a website. “There are so many things that we can do such as generating income through the website; selling our players as well as selling our merchandise.” He adds that mindsets have to change for people to realise that football is an industry with potential to contribute to the development of the country. He gives an example of Italy where football contributes three percent to the GDP. Ntshinogang says it is important that the BFA helps players to graduate to higher levels in terms of playing abroad.
The new broom at the BFA says that preparations should be stepped up to take advantage of the 2010 World Cup in South Africa. “We should start now to intensify our development programmes so that when the time comes, we can compete and probably take part in the World Cup.” On a related matter, Ntshinogang advocates for the introduction of a junior league. This will be a personal assignment that he intends to undertake. “Clubs should also take this as a challenge. We don’t need a lot of money to run this league. The reason why our youth teams don’t do well is because they are not exposed to a lot of competitions. We only throw them into the deep end at the last minute.”
He says that sponsors should be treated as partners. Hence they should be on board all the time so that they know what is happening. “They sponsor football because they want to pursue certain objectives and we should help them realise their objectives.” He says sports codes lose sponsors because they alienate them. “They only go back to the sponsors when they want to ask for more sponsorship and this is not right. We need to go back to our past sponsors and find out where we went wrong so that we can correct our mistakes.”
He knows very well that the BFA does not have money. He says if the association is to progress, they will have to forfeit other things so that they can go ahead with more beneficial programmes. He is a proponent of the philosophy that ‘you have to spend more money to get more money’.
He is not bothered by the fact that he is the youngest BFA CEO ever, because what matters is experience. Ntshinogang has just returned from abroad where he undertook a course in International Master in Management, Law and Humanities of Sport from the Centre Internationale d’etude du Sport (CIES) in Switzerland. For part of his studies he was in Italy and the United Kingdom. “Age is relative. What matters is your experience. Some people have worked as CEOs when they were younger than me and they excelled in their jobs. Experience tells me that I am old enough to know what I should do,” he says.
