CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
Background to the study
Football administration is a subset of Sports Management. Kelley et al (1994) defined sport management in a broad sense as “any combination of skills related to planning, organizing, directing, controlling, budgeting, leading, and evaluating within the context of an organisation or department whose primary product or service is related to sport and/or physical activity.”
Football administration the world over involves the supervision of its competitions, regulations, as well as ways of improving the game.
The highest level of football administration is in areas such as the Federation of International Football Association (FIFA), the various confederations under FIFA such as the Confederation of African Football (CAF). At the lower levels are the various federations such as the Ghana Football Association (GFA) and under the federations there are boards that are in charge of the day to day running of the domestic league such as the Premier League Board (PLB) in Ghana and the Professional League Board in England.
The Premier League Board (PLB) is the board responsible for the organisation of the top-flight league in Ghana designated as the Ghana Premier League. The First Capital Plus Bank is the headline sponsor of the league and the Board is the lead agency of domestic football administration in Ghana.
The Premier League Board like any other football administration through its activities generates large volumes of physical and electronic data and documents on a daily basis. These activities and transactions serve as records. The documents and data are very vital and need to be
preserved. Some of the activities and transactions undertaken by the PLB that lead to the creation of records are players registration, match reports, reports of the various standing committees like the Disciplinary Committee, Match Review Panel, Referees Committee, Safety and Security Committee, etc.
Record includes all the documents that institutions or individuals create or receive in the course of administrative and operational transactions. The records themselves form a part of or provide evidence of such transactions. As evidence, they are subsequently maintained by those responsible for the transactions, who keep the records for their own future use or others with a legitimate interest in the records, example Auditors.
Records come in a variety of media. Many are still created on paper, for example, correspondence, vouchers, contracts and supporting documentation. Information may also be recorded on paper in ledgers, journals and registers, or they may be in the form of computer printouts. Such records may be hand-written, hand-drawn, typed or printed. Increasingly, computers create financial records, and they may only exist in electronic format. Electronic mail is a form of record.
