There is a question that should keep every sports administrator, county governor, and football romantic awake at night, not with dread, but with possibility.
If Kenya can produce world-beaters in athletics, if our runners have conquered every road and track from Boston to Berlin, why has our football never truly left the estate?
Yet our football, played on every patch of flat ground from Moyale to Mombasa, has never once made the world stop and stare. Athletics did not find talent in some hidden valley. It built a system, and the talent came flooding in. Iten became a name the world knew because of intention, not geography. Football is still waiting for that moment of decision.
My dream starts with one number: 47. Not a budget figure. Forty-seven counties, forty-seven clubs, forty-seven reasons for Kenyans in every corner of this republic to care about a Saturday afternoon result.
Picture a Kenya Premier League where every county fields a team. Murang’a is hosting Meru. Kisii is travelling to Nyamira. Turkana is welcoming Marsabit. These are not fixtures on a spreadsheet. They are loaded encounters that carry language, culture, and community pride.
Go to Eldoret, Bungoma, Voi or Homa Bay and find the nearest open ground. You will see boys and girls playing barefoot with a patched-up ball, doing things with it that would turn heads at Nyayo Stadium. The problem was never the player. It has always been the system that was never built around them.
Spain’s La Liga grew because Eibar, a town of 30,000 people, once sat in the same division as Real Madrid. Brazil draws its soul from clubs in Fortaleza and Recife. Kenya has 47 such cities waiting.
Billions of shillings are staked weekly on the Premier League and Champions League by Kenyans who have never watched a live KPL match. A 20 per cent levy on net betting revenues, ring-fenced in a County Football Infrastructure Fund, would build and renovate stadiums across every county within one electoral cycle.
All gate collections must stay in the county. Parastatals, including KPLC, KRA, Equity Bank and KCB, spend millions on CSR. Adopting a county club costs less than a billboard and reaches deeper into communities.
This transformation will not come through federation circulars. His Excellency should formally assume the role of Patron of Kenya Football and call a national football summit, bringing together every governor, every Sports CEC, and every parastatal CEO in one room, with a clear message: this is a national development priority, not a sporting event.
Governors, your sports department is not a dustbin for officers who could not find a post elsewhere. Your Sports CEC should name every talented young player in the county, the coach who developed them, and the ground where they train; if they cannot, fix it.
Dennis Oliech, McDonald Mariga, Victor Wanyama, Ayub Timbe. These men carry knowledge in their boots that no manual can replicate. In Spain, the knowledge loop never breaks; retired professionals coach at every tier of the game. Kenya must build pathways to bring its stars into academies as directors, mentors and coaches.
Give the former stars a county team to manage and a youth setup. Watch the culture change in five years.
Football’s golden generation is already alive in Kwale, Siaya, West Pokot and Isiolo, playing with whatever they have. They do not need us to discover them. They need us to build the road from that dusty ground to a proper pitch, to a county league, to the national team and to the world.
