Way back in February 2006, I was young (still am!) and idle. I had recently gotten out of High School and had little to do. So there was this weekend that I wanted to go watch a local football (aka soccer) game. What did I do? I immediately turned to Google to try find out what games would be on that weekend. Guess what? There was literally nothing on Kenyan football. There was no information on teams, players, fixtures….or anything else.
It was sad. See, I love football to death.
So I did what any idle young soul that loves football would have done 😛 I went forth and started Kenyan Soccer. Here’s a little something I had written back then:
To put it simply, this blog is about the beautiful game. The game of soccer, the only game to ever be described as a religion.
I recently tried to find the Kenya premier league fixtures and was shocked at just how difficult it was. I still have not found the league standings table.
Kenyans do love soccer, right? Then why don’t we love our own soccer? I already know what you’re going to say (corruption, mismanaged, low quality football), yeah I’ve heard it all before, and I’ve even said it. BUT, as fans don’t we have responsibility to love the game regardless of what happens? I mean, that’s what soccer is all about; you win, sometimes you lose, you even get relegated, anything can happen in football but the passion of soccer fans lives on, it must. So that when your team gets out of the doldrums, success is that much sweeter because ma-fans wanajua wametoka mbali.
Soccer already has a passionate following in Kenya- you should only see the scramble for seats at pubs that offer DSTV on weekend afternoons, or even for Harambee Stars’ match tickets. But we need more passion.
That’s what this blog is about: the further development of Kenyan Soccer.
At it’s height, the blog was pretty successful – we once got a link from Wikipedia (which made me very proud!). It was also the first site dedicated to Kenyan football/soccer. 🙂
Sadly, one year later I stopped updating the blog. Why? I had started my university studies and a little business on the side – things were suddenly busy. Also, this site had emerged and was pretty encouraging back then. Apart from my site, Kenyafootball.com was the only other online source of information on Kenyan football and it was really good – professional writers and all, and connections too. It was hard to compete against them – I was just a kid with ideas and a laptop!
Almost three years later, nothing much has changed. Sure, kenyafootball.com has some amazing writers, good stories and provide lots of information but I still feel that the representation of our beautiful (the beautiful) game online is largely lacking. 🙁
I feel that we need much more than what kenyafootball.com offers. We need more community and more access to information. We need need to make Kenya football online to be more fan-centric – basically, I would like to see sites so good that they make fans want to go and watch the local league games.
Has anyone got any idea how we can achieve this?
Am impressed you had even started a blog about kenyan soccer, if there was info about it on the net then where did you get the info?
If you are starting a kenyansoccer site, i’d like to be a part of it. But to make the website big would be a 24-hr job! Are you thinking to make money off it? Because money will be spent to build it.
Its a good thought and i’m letting it linger in brain to generate ideas though i already have a few in mind which i will share with you.
Where did I get the info? Oh, I did it the hard way. I used to attend at least one match per weekend and on some weekends a kind friend or two would attend another match. The other info we got from the papers (at that time, the papers had just the bare minimum), radio, and TV. It was not a lot, but it used to work.
I remember one time we went to see one of the KFF big shots – he talked so well you’d think our game was finally going to get better. But we saw him on TV just a few days later talking rubbish and acting…questionably 🙁
Yes, to do such a site would be quite an undertaking. I believe one could make it in such a way that it doesn’t suck up too much of ones time.
Make money? Of course! We have to make it worthwhile, don’t we?
Been trying to reach you but Gmail’s been down for hours! 🙁