Mathare United which plies its trade in the Football Kenya Federation (FKF) Premier League is the latest team to be rocked by financial constraints.
According to the management, the slum boys will be unable, for the first time in 28 years, to honour a top-flight league fixture.
The club’s chairman Bob Munro on Saturday, through a letter, laid bare the dire situation the 2008 champions are facing even as he dropped the bombshell that the team will not play Sunday’s match against Bandari.
The Slum Boys who are currently relegation-threatened with 11 points, 16 adrift the relegation safety, were scheduled to host Bandari at Kasarani Annex starting 3pm.
However, the new revelations by the long-serving Munro has thrown the spanner in the works.
“Today is a sad day in the 35-year history of the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) and Mathare United FC (MUFC).
It is a sad and painful day for me and the MUFC staff, coaches, players and their families as well as for the tens of thousands of youth in the Mathare and neighbouring slums who dream of helping themselves and their families escape poverty by someday playing for Mathare United.
“Today, sadly, our team is financially unable to host and honour a match for the first time since we started playing in the FKF leagues 28 years ago.
Coincidentally, today we’re scheduled to play Bandari whose head coach, Anthony Kimani, is a MYSA/MUFC legend who captained our 2008 Kenyan Premier League Championship team, whose goalkeeper Coach, Wilson Oburu, is a former MYSA/MUFC goalkeeper, and whose line-up includes previous MYSA/MUFC stars such as defender Andrew Juma, midfielders Whyvonne lsuza and Kevin Kimani plus striker Chris Ochieng,” Munro, who is also the club’s founder, said in a letter.
Munro blamed their financial struggles on, among others, the FKF forced expansion of the Kenyan Premier League (KPL) in February 2017, the related SuperSport termination of their KPL contract in March 2017 and the Covid-19 pandemic which forced the league to be stopped for five months in 2020.
The club, under the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) which was founded some 35-years ago, has produced some of the best footballers in the country including Titus Mulama, and James Kinyanjui just to name a few.
Mathare’s turmoil is just the tip of the iceberg with the problem of refusing to relinquish its grip on Kenyan football and by extension, the sports sector with Rugby and Hockey also grappling with the same issues.
Prior to the letter by Mathare, most clubs had been forced to turn to the FKF Caretaker Committee for a financial support after exhausting their coffers and are unable to fund their operations including paying staff salaries.