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Innocent Kurira, Sports Reporter

PART of the Highlanders leadership left the country for Europe yesterday where they are scheduled for what they have termed a “look and learn” tour of European countries.
The 10-day tour, which is facilitated by the club’s principal sponsor Sakunda Holdings, will see board chairman Luke Mnkandla, executive committee chairman Johnfat Sibanda, secretary Morgan Dube and treasurer Busani Mthombeni seek possible relations with European clubs while also learning modern-day football trends.

Highlanders Press conference

The quartet will begin their business in Paris, France, where they will spend three days before splitting up.

Mnkandla and Sibanda will head for Manchester while Dube and Mthombeni are destined for Barcelona, Spain, again for three days.
They will reunite to conclude the tour in Brussels Belgium.
Dube outlined what they intend to benefit from the tour.

“The major objective of this tour is to give us what we term a look and learn. We will be meeting clubs at that end and of course the fans.
“As you know Highlanders has fans all over the world, particularly in the United Kingdom.

“We are already in communication with our membership that end who will then meet the two chairmen in their areas and discuss what is happening with their club here.
“We will do the same in Spain. But our schedule in Spain is not involving any fans but clubs that we are looking at creating relations with,” said Dube.

“We are hoping to get partnerships and have an appreciation of the infrastructure in these respective countries. We will also be engaging them on how they are structured as football clubs. Of course, we are hoping to create possible relations in terms of player exchange and as well as technical staff exchange.

“We are hoping to have these (players and technical staff) being attached and learning what is done at these clubs.”
Dube added that the tour will help them identify some things they will share with the club members.

“We are hoping we will pick up necessary things that we hope will help the club. We will also engage our membership to see if we are all happy taking whatever we would have brought,” he said.
“At a certain stage, we are hoping to get into partnerships if we get any and we start exchanging our personal for the benefit of the club.”

Asked why the chief executive officer Ronald Moyo was not part of the tour since he is in charge of the club’s day-to-day operations, Dube said:
“We are not at the implementation stage. We are not even at a decision-making stage.

“We are at a stage that l can call a preliminary stage. It’s an exploration where we want to see if what we want relates to what they have then if certain clubs give us what we think is the direction to take that is when we then make a decision. After that decision, we then rope in the people that implement.

“We categorise these programmes, this is not necessarily a workshop or seminar. We will need the CEO when we go to the workshop and seminar because that is implementation.

Highlanders Press conference

“As we speak, in the next seven days our CEO will be travelling to South Africa for a two-day PAN Africa Sports Management workshop.” —  @innocentskizoe