Broke Kenyan football clubs losing survival fight

There was a time when Kenyan football was it its lowest ebb.

The social pit was for real and there were teams that could not travel to honour their fixtures for lack of funds! In this column we bewailed the fate of Shabana football club that could not afford to send their players some 60 kilometres to Awendo to play Sony sugar.

That situation was, to say the least, very disturbing and almost unbelievable! The fare for each player on public transport was just about Sh100. Shabana was not the only team suffering then, there were many others faring worse.

There were teams that could not muster quorum even for training sessions. They were erroneously reported to be “soldiering on”; of course an army that has no weapons and lack food and training cannot soldier on.

The coach would rally the few players whose parents had the ability to pay fare for their talented youngsters to travel and play far from home.

This made it untenable and laughable since some of the players that could travel were extremely unfit and the teams ended up losing all the away matches and some have since disbanded.

Some few days ago, one Steve Omondi writing in the daily nation posed very pertinent questions about the ownership of clubs by companies.

The companies do not see the rationale of sponsoring teams within their locality and branding the jerseys with their logo. They insist on owning them totally and when budget cuts come, it is the teams that are abandoned fast.

That is the situation that has killed many dreams of talented youth and as we can see Nakumatt FC going down due to the situation in the company.

We know that the financial situation in Kenyan football is on a downward spiral. The main reason for it this time round was occasioned by the withdrawal of sponsors of the league and the clubs are feeling the very uncomfortable heat.

SuperSport left in 2017 and SportPesa left at the beginning of this year. The reason for their leaving is well known to us all and we shall not belabour the point further. We shall only learn how not to treat sponsors in future.

At the moment we must heed the call of Thika United head coach Nicholas Muyoti who recently lamented that he is struggling to raise quorum even for his team’s training session.

He said: “The situation is really bad for clubs and the players. Nothing is coming their way and it is a big danger to the game if the players, who I regard as main stakeholders cannot enjoy these things.

“I want to challenge the federation and KPL to take the lead in sorting these issues out, as fast as possible because we are sinking as a football fraternity. The sooner they take control of this, the better,”

At the moment, many players are going without pay or depend on well wishers for their upkeep! This is not a good situation at all and the authorities must do something about it or else cease to be called ‘authorities’.