If you visit the Kenya Premier League (KPL) website, you will be asked for your views regarding the teams you think will be relegated at the end of the 2013 season. One of these teams is Mathare United, the famous and once mighty Slum Boys from the fertile soccer belt of the expansive Mathare valley.
The club is lumped together in this poll of the damned with Karuturi Sports, Homeboys, Sony Sugar, Western Stima, and Muhoroni Youth. Instead of being up there, contending with Gor Mahia for the title, the team is contemplating life in the unglamorous division one league. Infact, the gap between Mathare united and the newly crowned Tusker Premier League champions is a whole 29 points, which is more than Mathare's season-long harvest of 28 points.
The club is balancing precariously on top of Sony Sugar (27 from 26 matches); Homeboyz (26 from 27); and Karuturi Sports (21 from 27). From the look of things, Karuturi's goose is as good as cooked. Who is likely to follow them through the relegation trap door? The leading contenders appear to be Homeboyz, Sony Sugar and Mathare United. And it is not the first time that Mathare United find themselves in a similar situation. It is an experience they have gone through in the recent past, only that this time, survival chances appear very minimal.
People unfamiliar with Kenyan football might be forgiven for thinking that it has always been like this for the struggling Slum Boys. But these 2013 relegation favourites actually won the 2008 Kenyan Premier League, having come close several times before their famous triumph.
Besides, the club have twice won the country's knock out tournament currently known as the GOTV Shield Cup. They were champions on first attempt in 1998, when they were not even playing in the Premier league. The Slum Boys won it again in 2000. One can therefore confidently say that the ten year period stretching between 1998 and 2008 marked Mathare United's golden football era. During this period, Mathare United played the most entertaining football in Kenya. It was a tiki-taka , self assured and devastatingly effective brand of football. The club was Kenya's Barcelona F.C. of the day.
Apart from making their presence felt in local football, the club also made several appearances on the continental scene. They played in the 2009 edition of CAF Champions League, bowing out in the preliminary round after a 5-0 thrashing by Zambia's ZESCO United. The club had experienced a slightly better outing in the 1999 CAF Cup Winners Cup tournament where they reached the second round. A 2001 participation in the same tournament ended in round one.
They also participated in the 2002 CAF Cup, bowing out in the first round of a tournament that has since been renamed the CAF Confederations Cup. Seeing that Mathare United at one point threatened to establish themselves as a dominant force in Kenyan and regional football, what suddenly went wrong? It appears that the club's management misplaced their priorities along the way.
A very effective strategy, which has worked wonders wherever it has been employed, brought a lot of success to Mathare United. I am talking about the strategy of patiently developing soccer players from their childhood and gradually growing them through the youth ranks, and then finally unleashing them on footballing opponents with devastating effect.
It is what has kept the Catalan bandwagon of Barcelona rolling on and on at the pinnacle of World club football. West African teams, too, have relied on the same strategy to churn out generation after generation of world beaters. Even Burkina Farso, who for a long time were among a very limited select league of teams that Kenya could brag of having beaten home and away, seem to have deployed the strategy to lethal effect, first coming to inches of winning the 2013 African Cup of Nations (before being out played by a resurgent Nigeria), then, actually now, standing on the threshold of gatecrashing the Brazil 2014 World cup. For what can you say of a team that in less than a month's time, takes a 3-2 advantage to an Algerian side that is no longer the dreaded force of yore.
So we are agreed that it was through maintaining a constant and quality supply of young players for their senior team that Mathare United managed to confidently strut their stuff with the big boys of Kenyan football. Then something appears to have suddenly gone wrong. First of all, how do you enter two clubs in the same premier league and call one "United" and another "Youth?" For heavens sake it is not the same as having a red-blooded Manchester United and a blue-blooded Manchester City! That is big enough a mistake to have committed to cause an outbreak of yells for some big fish's neck, but I guess the big fish at Mathare are not mere expendables.
Any way, the now big league playing Mathare Youth, but previously a very-effective-talent-churning-feeder-machine for the senior team, soon found the going tough in the premier league and finally got the relegation matching orders in 2008. The team could not survive in the lower Division One League either, and were finally disbanded on 13 August, 2012.
Unlike in the glory days when Mathare United boasted of possessing the youngest team in the Kenya Premier League, the team currently is composed of tiring veterans and old hands, many of them returnees who moved to other clubs in search of greener pastures but have gone back "home" only because no one else wants them. They include the likes of Francis Ouma, Edgar Ochieng and Simeon Mulama. Tired and rejected by their clubs, the players have found a new lease of life at their former parent club, but seemingly, the lease is not viable enough to save their club from falling off football's elite platform.
Meanwhile, the club's most talented players have recently jumped ship one after another and are now to be found at AFC Leopards SC, Gor Mahia SC, Tusker FC, Sofapaka FC and KCB FC, among others. The common thread of complaints among these "deserters" is poor or non-existent remuneration. So once again what went wrong at the thriving Mathare United? I hope this piece is not an obituary for the once glamour boys of Kenyan football-I hope they do not follow their junior side into oblivion.
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