Over the years, the game of football has kept growing, adapting to new emerging trends to make the sport more exciting.
One area where the game has grown is the focus on raw talent identification and nurturing. This has seen professional football teams making huge investments towards their youth and reserve sides as one way of minimising costs of buying players from elsewhere each and every transfer window.
Apart from being a cost-effective way of managing club’s expenses, Reserve sides also add depth to the first team especially during scenarios of injuries, suspensions and fatigue to first team players.
On 8 August this year, the Super League of Malawi opened the mid-season transfer window for Malawi’s elite league, the TNM Super League.
That window would run up to 4 September providing an opportunity to teams to bolster their squads as some aimed to avoid relegation whilst others were positioning themselves as serious title contenders.
At the close of the transfer window, a total of 109 player transactions were processed with 65 of those involving permanent and loan signings, 25 involved players leaving out their clubs with others being de-registered while 19 were retained by their employers just to highlight a few.
Relegation bound Songwe Boarder were the busiest of all the 16 teams as the Karonga based side signed 10 new players and proceeded to de-register 17 of their own.
The just closed window exposed one key element in football which is mostly overlooked or neglected.
The transfer window highlighted the role of reserve sides/lower league teams in player development.
Just factor this, of the 109 transfers that were processed between August and September, 27 involved players from lower league/reserve sides representing 29.23 percent of the whole transfer window activity.
Former super league side Baka City and Chipiku Stores Central region football league side Chatoloma Admarc were the highest contributors, contributing 3 players each to super league sides, while only 3 super league sides Nyasa Big Bullets, Silver Strikers and Blue Eagles made use of their reserve sides by either loaning out a player or promoting them to the main team.
Strugglers Songwe Border, Chitipa United and Karonga United were the biggest beneficiaries of these transfers from lower league/reserve teams.
There is however need to highlight that most Super league teams failed to fully utilize their reserve sides as out of the 16 teams, only 3 were in transfer activities involving their reserve sides.
Being a mid-season transfer window, such teams would be forgiven as they would argue that they did not want to destabilize an already established play set-up within their main teams, but moving forward teams need to fully make use of their reserve sides a cost-effective measure of managing finances.
