Malawi Football Calls for African Countries to Hire Local Coaches

Malawi national football team coach, Kina Phiri, has called on African countries to give chance to home grown football coaches to take charge of their countries and forgo the current fad across the continent of hiring expatriate coaches who are believed to be better even though they have not delivered.

Phiri's call has come just days after the announcement by Ivory Coast, one of the six teams to represent Africa at the 2010 FIFA World Cup, that they have hired Sven Goran Erikkson to lead them at the tournament. The appointment means that out of 32 countries at the tournament, only Algeria has an African coach.

Perhaps sensing the irony that the tournament will take place on Africa soil (South Africa), Phiri decried to the BBC World Services:

"It's not fair for us African coaches not to be given a chance to run our own national teams because in the first place most of us are well trained, I trained in Britain; so to me I think it's just because of our own mentality as Africans that we do not believe in our own people."

Phiri has a strong point in so far as statistics are concerned. National teams coached by home grown coaches have won the entire17 previous World Cups tournaments. In Africa, Egypt recently completed a hat trick of African Cup of Nations (AFCON) wins with a homegrown coach despite numerous other expatriates that led technically superior teams than Egypt at these AFCON tournaments.

Malawi itself has had a fair share of foreign football coaches but without any notable success or improvement. Malawi has never qualified to the World Cup before, it has qualified for AFCON only twice: in 1984 and 2010. Ironically, it was local coaches that led Malawi on both occasions. Phiri oversaw a relatively successful 2010 tournament while Henry Moyo coached the 1984 team that failed to register a single win.

"In this last 25 years [between 1984 and 2009] Malawi has been only hiring foreign coaches, the team never improved the way it has improved at the moment... When I took over the team was at 138 on FIFA rankings but now I've taken the team up to 83 on FIFA rankings, within two years." Phiri told the BBC World Service.

Phiri, a bursting centre forward in his playing days, has recently a signed a new and improved contract with Malawi government to continue, as national team coach. He is now poised to oversee 2012 AFCON qualification campaign. Malawi has been grouped with Tunisia, Botswana, and Chad. The tournament will be co-hosted by Gabon and Equatorial Guinea