Where is the roadmap for domestic club football?

Every football investor should take time to review the past 10 seasons of the Ugandan Premier League (UPL).

Recently, an investor from a company with a national brand sought my advice on investing in Ugandan club football. He has a vision of creating a footprint in Ugandan football by using a UPL club as a vehicle to market his company products and services.

He is specifically keen to understand how I successfully bankrolled SC Villa to win silverware in four years without a major sponsor.

Without blinking, I simply asked him to take a keen analysis of the past 10 years of the UPL. Expectedly, his enthusiastic observation was that Vipers SC and KCCA FC have been the most dominant clubs, but he could match their supremacy by injecting at least Shs 3bn into the club he chooses to buy and acquire the best players and coaching staff. His hope is to win titles within a year or two.

As he pushed on his narrative, I advised him look at the turnover of teams within those 10 years.

He returned days later to tell me that his company no longer has any business in Ugandan football!

His reason: “Ugandan club football is too risky to invest in if you are a mere participant and cannot control anything financial or sponsorship-related.”

I took him through the often-ignored damning statistic that shows in the past 10 seasons alone, 26 teams have been relegated from the UPL. Save for Proline FC, Police FC and Tooro United that have bounced back and gone down in different seasons, none of the other 23 teams has ever managed to return to top-flight football.

The most worrying bit is that from my count, 17 of these teams are now defunct, dead and buried! Yet these teams invested billions of shillings to promote the game only to realize they were doing it on their own.

Yeah, it is shocking but that’s the fact. Who remembers Kira Young, Rwenshama FC, SC Victoria University or JMC Hippos? That is just a tip off the iceberg. Several other clubs have gone down under such situations as the once formidable Onduparaka FC, Kyetume, MYDA and, most recently, Arua Hill.

The most conspicuous aspect in this is that all these affected clubs are community clubs, whose creation was mainly aimed at spreading the game to all corners of the country.

Unfortunately, the powers that be that govern the game see it differently. To them, football is a dog-eat-dog competition where the best survives and the losers die.

Today, the top-level competition is mostly comprised of institutional clubs, teams that have nothing to lose as long as they don’t get relegated.

As a result, several domestic clubs have been limited to mere participation in the UPL without major goals of conquering the region or continent.

Vipers may be the dominant force but that is all down to Dr Lawrence Mulindwa’s passion for the game. Even then, without the backup of St Mary’s SS Kitende, Vipers would struggle to keep at the top level.

All that leaves clubs like NEC, KCCA, URA in perennial contention for titles.

The likes of SC Villa and Express continue to blow hot and cold and they are only helped by the fact that they have a traditional fan base. Nothing sort of this would see them relegated.

My biggest worry at the moment is for investors in model clubs like Bright Stars and Wakiso Giants.

This season has not been good for them and they find themselves in the relegation zone. The two clubs have persevered for years but the end seems inevitable and my fear is that should they go down, it will all be done.

So, my message in all this is that domestic football needs a serious soul searching to find a way of integrating clubs from all walks of a life in order to keep the competition active.

Just a few years ago, the West Nile derby was the biggest fixture of the league both in terms of attendance and revenue.

To imagine that there is no longer a West Nile side is absurd. All this calls for a sobriety test on the UPL impact on the sporting landscape.

Just like my investor friend noted, Ugandan football needs a serious inclusive roadmap that can integrate investors with the administrators of the sport.

It is not too late for this.

Immanuel Ben Misagga

Cover Photo Credit: https://upl.co.ug