Football - Georges Bibi appointed new SFF secretary general |03 March 2017

The Seychelles Football Federation is now being run under a new secretary general with appointment of Georges Bibi, who has taken over from Jemmy Adela.

Bibi, who has been involved with football for many years, will be in charge of the administrative side of the SFF, where his work will see him oversee the country’s leagues and cup matches, football development as well as beach soccer itself.

“As secretary general of the SFF, I will now be in charge of the SFF as an organisation. I will oversee all the departments, including human resources, development, etc...,” said Mr Bibi.

The secretary general is normally chosen by the chairman of the federation and must be accepted by the executive committee, before being presented to Fifa, (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) which actually employs the secretary general to run the football federation. The secretary general is not employed by the SFF, but rather by Fifa.

Mr Bibi has stated that he has already laid out his plans for the future, where he wants to see improvements in all areas.

“Our main weaknesses at the moment concern league fixtures as well as the shortage of officials. We need to find ways to improve on these issues,” said Mr Bibi.

He added: “We have a lack of facilities and that has affected our fixtures in the past, but we have already been talking about ways to improve on this.”

Among the measures Mr Bibi hopes to take include decentralising football matches, stating they will soon be looking to improve the football pitches across Mahé to be able to host league matches so that Stad Linite will then be used as the national stadium, meaning, it will only host national team matches, continental club games and cup semifinals and finals.

“We also want to get teams to do their own marketing of their matches, print their own tickets and also set their own ticket prices for matches,” said Mr Bibi.

The new secretary general also spoke about the state of the Seychelles national team, revealing that the post of head coach is currently being advertised, but they have received only one application so far.

“We believe that a Seychellois can indeed take the job, but we are also open to receiving the input of foreign coaches,” he said before adding: “Foreigners bring more experience and their knowledge can be more effective when used alongside a local coach as well.”

Mr Bibi also pointed out that our clubs need to be more disciplined if we want to raise the level of football in the country. He added that he also wants to bring more discipline to football.

Meanwhile, outgoing secretary general Jemmy Adela will still be involved with the federation in another capacity, but we failed in our attempts to get some words from him.

Adela was the secretary general of the SFF since 2007, meaning he has spent 10 years in this post. Before Adela, it was Willem Boniface who occupied this position.

S.N.