The framework
Fifteen Parts Of A Football Industry
KickStartKenyaFootball is not a campaign to find talented children. Finding them is the easy part. What Kenya is short of is the industry around them: the people, the institutions, the buildings, the qualifications and the capital that turn a gifted fifteen-year-old into a professional career and a hundred other people’s jobs. This is the whole of it, and every part is covered somewhere on this platform.
The football ecosystem — 15 parts
A football industry is not fifteen talented children. It is fifteen professions, and our Plan addresses this problem.
The people on the pitch
Players
Boys and girls with somewhere to play, someone to coach them and a competition to be seen in.
Talent is found everywhere and developed almost nowhere: no age-group pathway, no minutes, no record of who played.
Coaches
Badged, paid coaches working with the same players week after week.
Too few licence holders, almost none of them earning a living from it, and no county-level coach education.
Referees
Trained, protected, paid officials, without whom no league can be trusted.
Refereeing is treated as a favour rather than a profession, so competitions collapse or lose credibility.
Scouts
People whose job is to watch, record and rate players against a standard.
Kenyan players are discovered by accident abroad rather than by design at home.
The people who run it
Administrators
Competition, registration, licensing and compliance staff who keep a season running.
Administration is the first cost cut and the first reason a league fails.
Club management
Directors, finance, commercial and operations staff running a club as a business.
Most clubs are incorporated late, capitalised thinly and run without published accounts.
Governance and regulation
The rules, and the enforcement of them: registration, licensing, safeguarding, disputes.
The law exists. Compliance, capacity and record-keeping do not.
The people who keep it standing up
Medical and fitness professionals
Physiotherapists, doctors, sports scientists and strength coaches.
Careers end at nineteen from injuries a professional set-up would have prevented or rehabilitated.
Education and training
Schooling alongside football, and vocational qualifications for everyone else in the game.
Players are asked to choose between school and football, and both are lost.
Media and content creators
Reporting, broadcast, photography and archive work that gives the game a public record.
Kenyan football history is disappearing because nobody was paid to write it down.
Agents and intermediaries
Licensed representation that protects a player in a contract negotiation.
Young players sign what they are handed, and lose fees, wages and years to it.
The places it happens
Facilities and infrastructure
Courts, pitches, floodlights, changing rooms, arenas and the running costs behind them.
A county can hold two million people and not one all-weather surface a child can book.
Professional clubs
Licensed, solvent clubs paying wages, running academies and holding assets.
Without solvent clubs there is no destination for a developed player and no employer for anyone else on this list.
The money that sustains it
Sponsorship
Commercial partners buying audience, association and activation rather than making donations.
Sponsorship follows measurement, and Kenyan football has published almost none.
Commercial investment
Priced, returnable capital into facilities, clubs and player development.
Money is asked for as charity and therefore arrives once. Investment recurs.