‘Promising future awaited for women’s football in Oman’

Hajer al Muzayani, the head of Women’s Football Division at Oman Football Association (OFA), worked very hard to achieve various milestones of development of women’s football at the domestic level. The active lady at OFA spoke on a range of issues in an exclusive interview with Oman Daily Observer. Highlighting on the stages of women’s football development in the Sultanate. “The first appearance of the women’s football activities in the Sultanate is back to 2004. The first official women’s football team was presented later by Bausher club as they had many regional participation in UAE and Jordan and the team was under coaching supervision of Haroon Amer al Burtomani,” she added. “Later, In 2015 Oman Football Association (OFA) launched the women’s football department. The main roles of the section were to develop this field and diversify the ways which matched the lifestyle of the Omani woman. One of the earlier decisions taken were organisation of many domestic tournaments, coaching and referring courses at the schools and festivals level. In 2016, the inaugural edition of women football tournament had been organised and around eight teams took part at the event representing different organisations and clubs. The tournament continued for three continuous years until 2019 where the plan came to have quite a bigger league which involved all the Sultanate governorates and wilayats and it will last for six months. The head of Women’s Football Division at OFA proudly voiced that the launching of Oman’s women futsal league was in this season 2019/2020 after a huge work has been done for this project. “It is one of the crucial milestones which occurred this year. For first time, we had participation of many women’s teams including 30 teams and 16 clubs took part with a dedicated women’s football team. This huge participation gave us a good push to continue and to pump more efforts in the continuity of the tournament and the development of it. This season also featured many workshops and seminars on coaching and umpiring courses besides the schools tournament at South Al Batinah and Dhofar governorates. Another achievement registered this season was the development of Oman women’s football and that Maryam al Hadhrami was named as the first Omani umpire who has an international licence and that will lead to more referees and umpires in the near future,” she added. Al Muzayani represented the Sultanate in many international conferences and workshops. “I attended conferences related to women’s football in Fifa premises. I found that the challenges of women’s football are almost same and it differs from Arab to foreign countries. It was a golden opportunity for me to highlight on Oman’s role to improve women in all fields including sports and football,” she told Oman Daily Observer. “Forming up a first national women football team is a huge project which we worked into it for long. The women football league was the initial step to choose the best talented players and recently we concluded the selection of Arabian coach who will lead the team, She has good experience in this field and very soon will announce the details. The next expected participation for the national women football team is scheduled in Kuwait at the end of this year,” she concluded.