BFF in a quandary over Sylhet BKSP

Since the signing of an agreement between Bangladesh Football Federation (BFF) and National Sports Council (NSC) in December, 2011 over possession of Sylhet BKSP, the game's governing body has so far been able to run the Sylhet BKSP as its football academy for only nine months.

The five-year contract will come to an end in December this year and the BFF wants to renew the contract for another 15 years, but it has been learnt that the BKSP authority wants to share it with BFF.

Regarding this issue as well as the venues of upcoming Bangladesh Premier League and proposed Bangladesh Super League, the BFF president Kazi Salahuddin and his colleagues held a meeting with the sports and youth secretary Kazi Akter Uddin Ahmed at the ministry yesterday where the BFF boss saw little hope of getting the Sylhet BKSP.    

“We had talks regarding the Sylhet BKSP, but there is ambiguity. Our plan will not work if Sylhet BKSP is not given for 15 years. I can't understand what they really want to do. We still need two to four meetings to clarify it. I am actually not hopeful about the Sylhet BKSP. It is not possible to run other disciplines of BKSP and a football academy simultaneously,” Salahuddin told reporters at his office later in the day.

“What I realised through the discussion is that BSKP wants to start other disciplines in Sylhet along with football, but the BFF wants it for a long term. I think it is a big issue,” said NSC secretary Ashok Kumar, who was also present at the meeting.

The BFF had spent a lot of time to start the academy partially despite getting a handsome fund from the FIFA Goal Project and had stopped it within nine months citing that the activities were stopped as per prescription of the FIFA development officer.

Meanwhile, the BFF president also sought cooperation of the sports ministry for allotment of some stadiums to run professional football league as well as the proposed Bangladesh Super League.

“We are hopeful with the outcome of the meeting as the sports secretary agreed to renovate the stadiums immediately as per our requirements. They feel it is time to work with football. They also promised to allot the district stadiums to the district football associations for a certain time to run district football,” Salahuddin said, adding that the BFF is even ready to share profit with the sports ministry for using stadiums in Dhaka, Chittagong, Sylhet, Rangpur, Rajshahi, Mymensingh, Barisal, Khulna and Gopalganj.