The Uganda Premier League (UPL) has 16 clubs yet most of the European leagues that Ugandans follow have 20 clubs. Recently there was an idea (the kind of rumor you hope doesn’t have any truth to it) UPL would be expanded from 16 to 20 clubs. Some football followers in Uganda might support the idea but if anyone is closely following UPL they wouldn’t support the idea. The general thinking amongst most Ugandans is that in a 20 team league, players get to play almost 40 matches per season and apparently a professional footballer should play an average of 40 matches a season.

Grapevine Sports’ Ben Mwesigwa (@mwesben on twitter) breaks down why UPL should have fewer clubs.

Football has players, officials, administrators, coaches, fans/supporters, clubs and parents as stakeholders. Football in Uganda is not yet developed because the stakeholders mentioned are still operating at a very low capacity. For instance: the ratio of footballers per qualified coach is about 10,000:1 meaning that for every 10,000 players you have one coach that can handle that group. The number of qualified referees is still very low too. As for administrators, we still don’t have highly qualified club C.E.O’s that can sit in a meeting to identify problems faced by clubs and come up with solutions to implement and solve problems.

As for clubs themselves, they have a very low capacity to operate as clubs. 99.9% of Football clubs in Uganda don’t own a training ground and use poor quality surfaces, structures like stadiums are either lacking, dilapidated or poor maintained, there’s no club structure in place to show how to market the club, attract fans, developing players through a club structure is not in place. To make it worse, you just have to follow the FUFA Junior’s League (FJL) and realize that most of the 16 clubs don’t run their own U-18 teams but outsource players from schools. The problems faced by clubs are way too many.

With all those problems, here is what happens in the UPL; The second round fixture requires crossed fingers to go according to plan, most clubs can’t afford to hire qualified club administrators, can’t hire the right number of qualified coaches, can’t afford medical expenses, don’t have home grounds, poor training facilities, don’t make money from gate collections, clubs are not properly run to make business sense. All these problems create a mountain for UPL administrators, especially when it comes to making the fixture.

With 16 clubs in the UPL, making a fixture requires rocket science, the fixture is usually released very late which affects planning and budgeting for teams and fans. The second round fixture is always separate and released one week before start of the second round. All this creates uncertainty and affects proper planning and training by clubs.

HOW DOES UPL AND FUFA SOLVE THIS PROBLEM?

Our society is faced with a lot of copy and paste syndrome, we forget that we are copying solutions from societies that have different problems from ours. Federation of Uganda Football Associations (FUFA) and UPL need to be very creative. Ugandan football has unique problems which require unique solutions. FUFA and UPL need to be very ruthless too.

Development will most times require being ruthless which will affect most people in the short run but will benefit the future generations forever, In Uganda we tend to be very lenient, this leniency hampers development which makes us stagnate or develop at snail pace. That explains why football in Uganda is developing at a very slow rate yet we have a huge gap to catch up with.

FUFA has the mandate to come up with a demanding club licensing system for clubs eligible to participate in the UPL. Ruthlessness can be applied in a lenient way by setting deadlines.

First of all, the number of clubs has to be reduced from 16 to 10 clubs. Then come up with a creative way for the clubs to play 28 matches in a season. Clubs too need to be given criteria like which club structure to adopt, the qualified human resource to be hired in that structure, the quality of facilities to have and everything that would be desirable for a league to be run very well.  At this point FUFA and UPL would meet clubs and inform them that starting with the 2020-21 season only ten clubs that will have met the following criteria will be licensed to play in the top flight league, the criteria goes on for the lower leagues too. That is an example of being ruthless in a lenient way. The clubs are informed two seasons in advance then they start owning up to their problems and how to solve them.

Having fewer clubs in the top flight league would enable UPL and FUFA to operate with the available resources, it would develop competitiveness which would bring about rapid development. The league can always grow and have 20 clubs as we all want but those 20 clubs should have their own stadiums (I mean real stadiums), quality training grounds, good health and medical services for all involved in football. They should also be proper clubs with every club structure operating in practice.