Is Malawi football’s coaching job safe?

Eight coaches. One league. Four months. That was the worrying arithmetic of Malawi’s 2026/27 FDH Bank Premiership season, but the coaching sack race has now spread beyond the top flight, raising broader questions about how Malawian clubs respond to poor results.

Tione Tembo was the first casualty after Kamuzu Barracks struggled for consistency, before FCB Nyasa Big Bullets parted ways with interim coach Gilbert Chirwa. Karonga United then dismissed Audlow Makonyola, followed by Creck Sporting Club’s decision to release Eliya Kananji and Goshen City Dedza Dynamos’ dismissal of Alex Ngwira.

Then came one of the biggest surprises of the season. Just after midnight on August 28, Mighty Wanderers suspended coach Bob Mpinganjira following their Airtel Top 8 final defeat to Ekhaya FC, despite the Nomads sitting second in the league with 29 points from eight wins, five draws and only one defeat.

Mpinganjira was not an ordinary coach. He had been named Malawi’s best coach in 2025 after guiding Mighty Wanderers to their first league title since 2017, while the club had also invested in his development by sending him for coaching refreshers in Scotland. Yet, with the Nomads chasing every available trophy, losing the Top 8 final proved costly.

The irony was almost too much to ignore. Enos Chatama, the coach who had just masterminded Ekhaya’s Airtel Top 8 triumph over Mighty Wanderers, was himself dismissed shortly afterwards following a goalless draw against Karonga United that left Ekhaya 11th at the end of the first round.

Chatama’s dismissal came after a run of seven league matches without victory, during which Ekhaya collected only four points from a possible 21. His last league win had come on June 28 against MAFCO and despite his success in cup football, the club ultimately prioritised league consistency.

Then Silver Strikers joined the growing list, with Peter Mgangira losing his job despite having guided a side that had spent much of the season at the top of the table and possessed the league’s best defensive record.

Going into match day 15, Silver had conceded only five goals from eight wins, five draws and one defeat. Then came the 5-0 hammering by FCB Nyasa Big Bullets — Silver’s heaviest defeat in two decades and five goals conceded in one match, equal to their entire tally from the previous 14 league games.

In second elite league NBS Nation Division League.On September 10,2026, Chilobwe United announced through its official Facebook page that head coach Elvis Kafoteka had been temporarily suspended from his duties with immediate effect as the club undertakes an internal administrative process. The development adds another coaching change to a season already characterised by uncertainty on the benches.

Another case in NBS National Division, where Mighty Tigers and Ntanja Rangers have parted ways with their head coaches over performance concerns. It means the debate can no longer be confined to Malawi’s top-flight clubs. The pressure on coaches is becoming a wider feature of domestic football.

Nobody is arguing that coaches should be protected from accountability. Football is a results business and when results consistently fall below expectations, coaches must answer difficult questions. But Malawi football has become dangerously comfortable with one particular solution: fire the head coach.

And here is the question clubs must answer: why is the head coach often the only person punished when an entire technical structure is responsible for preparing the team? Assistant coaches, fitness coaches, goalkeeping coaches and analysts all form part of the football department, yet when results collapse, the axe almost always falls on the man at the top.

If a head coach fails, the entire technical setup should at least undergo a serious performance review. That does not necessarily mean every member of the backroom staff must be fired, but keeping the same technical structure while replacing only the head coach can leave Malawi football chasing symptoms instead of treating the disease.

In Europe, when a head coach leaves, members of his technical team frequently leave with him because they are part of his football philosophy and working structure. Malawi does not need to copy Europe blindly, but it can learn from the principle that accountability should follow responsibility.

The National Football Coaches Association of Malawi (NFCA) has now raised another concern, saying clubs should engage the association before terminating the contracts of its members. NFCA secretary Sulivan Kandulu says Ekhaya FC and Silver Strikers did not notify the association before removing Chatama and Mgangira, despite the association’s earlier position on such matters.

Kandulu has also warned that clubs can sometimes rush into dismissals without properly examining the factors behind poor results. In Silver’s case, he pointed to injuries to defenders Lumbani Nyondo and Eric Atsigah as circumstances that should have been considered before concluding that Mgangira was solely responsible for the team’s problems.

That argument deserves serious attention because football is not played on a spreadsheet. Injuries, recruitment, player form, squad depth, administration, finances and unrealistic expectations can all influence results, yet the coach often becomes the easiest person to blame when things go wrong.

The danger is that the sack is slowly becoming a strategy rather than a last resort. A new coach needs time to understand his squad, implement his methods, build relationships with players and correct weaknesses, but constant fear of dismissal encourages short-term survival rather than sustainable football development.

Malawi wants better coaches, stronger clubs and improved performances in continental competitions. But that ambition will be difficult to achieve if coaches remain disposable whenever results dip. Mpinganjira won a league title, Chatama won the Airtel Top 8 and Mgangira built one of the strongest defences in the league yet all three eventually found themselves on the wrong side of the sack culture.

So perhaps Malawi football should stop asking, “Who should we fire?” and start asking, “What went wrong, who was responsible and what must change?”
If the answer to every football crisis is another head coach, eventually there will be nobody left to blame. And that would expose the real failure: not a shortage of coaches, but a shortage of patience, proper systems and accountability beyond the man sitting on the bench.