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What's Wrong with ANFA?
The FIFA World Cup 2026 has begun, and the whole world is excited except for the fans who are attending the tournament. Ticket prices are off the roof because the corrupt FIFA wallahs want to make a killing as usual. This is probably the most expensive tournament in terms of ticket prices, and many fans from all over the world who have traveled to the host countries are not happy.
FIFA has always been mired in controversies, and we all know about the corruption at the highest levels, but if you look at our ANFA, they seem to be following the same model of giving tons of benefits and perks to the officials while players get peanuts.
It's a good thing that the Balen government has appointed mostly former athletes to head the National Sports Council (NSC), our supreme sporting body, but when it comes to respective sports organizations, we seem to see the same jholeys of the old chor parties from Congress, UML and Maoist (CUM) leading the organizations to ruin.
How does ANFA work? They receive more than Rs 100 crore a year from FIFA for grassroots football development, as well as related training and infrastructure. While our ANFA officials take home salaries in lakhs per month, our players barely get paid enough to survive in Kathmandu.
ANFA has not been able to conduct the national league for years, and they are busy defending themselves for doing nothing. Two of the ANFA head honchos were stopped at immigration at TIA when they were planning to fly to America to attend the World Cup and some FIFA conferences on the side. Yes, FIFA paid for their vacation, and they have strongly criticized our government's move to stop the chor ANFA officials from flying to the US.
FIFA has warned that it will ban Nepal from all football activities worldwide if the government continues to interfere with ANFA. I think FIFA knows very well how corrupt our ANFA officials are but they think that since they were elected in a fair election, they have the right to run ANFA to the ground and destroy football in Nepal.
Ganesh Thapa, who headed ANFA decades ago, was banned by FIFA for ten years after foreign media reports kindly made us aware that his son has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from some Qatari (for Nepal's vote!) and got himself a nice six-figure job at the Asian Football Confederation in Malaysia and Ganesh Daju himself could not account for the missing Rs 54 crores from ANFA accounts over a decade.
Ganesh Thapa even got a clean chit from the CIAA because we all know that he had distributed the looted funds to Oli, Deuba and Prachanda and even sarkari hakims tasked with the investigation. That's how it has worked in Nepal for the past three decades.
Most of the district football associations and even our football clubs in the country are run either by local mundreys, jholeys or some shady figures who are in it just to be the chairperson of the club and get a vote for ANFA elections, which they can use to enrich themselves during the election.
I think the best option for the NSC would be to ask for all financial audits for the past decade from all sports organizations in the country. We have more than 200 registered
sports organizations with the NSC, but overall, fewer than 50 are legally active. We need to disband the 150 hawa taari naam ko matra sports organizations and then demand accountability and transparency from the 50 remaining sports organizations.
I think the NSC has to make it mandatory for all sports organizations to have at least 50% of the executive committee seats reserved for former athletes who have played the sports professionally or at the national levels for at least three years and 10% for former coaches and referees who have at least 5 years or more experiences. We cannot have local mundreys, shady byaparis and old party jholeys running the show, faking their audit reports and enjoying foreign vacations and extra perks anymore.
In my personal opinion, we should allow these two ANFA chors to go to America to attend the World Cup and have some fun because we don't want FIFA to ban us from all international football activities but at the same time, once they come back, we need to seriously ask them to amend their constitution and put term limits and lower their lakhs per month salaries by 80% and then ask them to conduct elections fairly.
We also need to carry out a financial audit of all district football associations and registered football clubs that get to vote in the ANFA elections, and if the books are cooked, then bar these same old chors from standing up for elections in their respective districts, football clubs and even for ANFA as well.
ANFA has always been a gold mine for the looters who come in promising to take Nepali football to greater heights but end up looting more than the previous chors. We need to start from zero, and it's a long road head and we need to learn more and maybe partner with the youth academies of premier football clubs from around the world.
Just because China and India are not in the FIFA World Cup doesn't give us a chance to sympathise with ANFA or with ourselves. Curaçao, a small nation with barely 150,000 folks are in the World Cup for the first time. If we start now and start from the primary schools and make football more professional and think long-term, then who knows, our men and women could be participating in the FIFA World Cups in a decade or two.
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