Bangladesh Football Federation has planned to hold a musical concert at their premier venue Bangabandhu National Stadium to raise some funds in less than a month after it had vehemently opposed a similar progarmme before the ICC World Twenty20. The BFF was very disappointed as the National Sports Council allowed the Bangladesh Cricket Board to hold a celebration concert on April 12, which had caused a significant damage to the venue.
Some BFF officials blasted the NSC for allowing similar programmes at the expense of football and few other sports which are dependent on the venue. But now the BFF itself decided to hold a concert on the pretext of raising funds for the game.
‘We are weighing up many options to raise funds for the development of football and musical concert is one of them,’ BFF general secretary Abu Nayeem Sohag said after an executive committee meeting on Monday.
‘To develop the game we need more money and our executive committee members discussed about the ways to generate funds and we decided that if needed we will organise a musical concert at the BNS,’ he said.
‘The BNS had been used many times by other sports federations in the past and we failed to stop them. Now we decided to use this for the
betterment of football,’ he said, adding that nothing had been finalised yet in this regard.
‘We have just agreed in principle and if we finally hold the concert we will make our best effort to avoid doing any damage to the playing surface,’ said Sohag.
Sohag said that they are chalking up plans to generate more money to run the game swiftly and for that they are going to meet with the state minister for youth and sports, Biren Sikder, and deputy minister Arif Khan Joy today.
‘We have many plans to collect more money for football and the top officials of the BFF will meet the ministers today to seek financial assistance from the government,’ said Sohag.
‘In the meeting we will request the ministers to allot some venues outside Dhaka in favour of BFF so that we can run football outside of the capital smoothly.
‘Besides holding musical concert at the football field, the BFF is also trying to arrange a lottery to create a football welfare fund,’ Sohag said.
-With New Age input
