Cameroon’s Sports and Physical Education minister Adoum Garoua has fixed match bonuses for the country’s national football team players as part of efforts to avoid other conflicts like the one last October that led to the suspension of team captain Samuel Eto’o and his deputy Enoh Eyong for eight and two matches, respectively.
Accordingly, henceforth the Indomitable Lions will each take in 4 million CFA francs for any match won in the qualifiers of the African Nations Cup (AFCON) and 2 million CFA francs for a draw.
In addition each player will get 500,000 CFA francs as participation bonus for each training session leading to an official game of the AFCON and should the team qualify for the competition proper they will be entitled to a special bonus to be decided by the state.
As for the World Cup, the players will each bag home 5 million CFA francs and 2.5 million CFA francs for a win and draw respectively. Moreover, should the squad qualify for the second round of the World Cup these amounts will both be increased by 500,000 CFA francs?
This decision was taken after the meeting the minister held with the senior players of the team, including goalkeeper Idriss Carlos Kameni, midfielder and deputy captain Enoh Eyong, defender Nicolas Nkoulou, and mid-fielder Alexandre Song, in Metz, France on Thursday morning to seek solutions to some problems that have been plaguing the smooth running of the country’s national team.
Finances have been the major destabilizing force in the Lions’ den, reaching its peak when the players refused to travel to Algeria last October for a friendly following a tournament in Marrakesh, Morocco.
Cameroon’s national squad is currently camping in the French city ahead of next month AFCON and World Cup qualifiers against DR Congo, Guinea-Bissau, and Libya. The first two games shall be played in the country capital Yaounde while the last one shall take place in Sfax, Tunisia, because of the ongoing political crisis in their North African opponent.
They take on Guinea this Saturday in the French city as the warm-up for the upcoming games.
