Our Youth. Our Plan. Our Football.About us
Kenya produces top footballers despite minimum investment into football infrastructure. With moderate investment into football infrastructure Kenya can produce more top players — and a sector that pays wages, taxes and tourism receipts back into the country.
This is where the work gets published. Follow the news and progress updates on every milestone, from futsal courts and county leagues to the national training facility and the Starlets academy. Aspiring coaches will find badge pathways, session plans and mentoring; players will find guidance on academy routes, how trials normally work and what moving abroad really involves; and anyone curious about the business of the game will find how clubs, sponsorship, media rights, agency work, physio, analysis, groundskeeping and administration actually pay. Kenya has never lacked talent. What it has lacked is infrastructure, coaching and information — so we are building all three in the open, backed by a diaspora that sends home $4.5 billion a year.
The journey runs across recommended steps: planning and rebranding, stackable pitches and futsal courts, county academies and coach education, and modular community stadiums in key counties. Each carries an indicative cost estimate rather than a committed budget, and each is open to better ideas from people closer to the ground.
That direction is deliberately aligned with the Kenya Premier League Strategic Plan 2022-2027 — its grassroots and schools programme, its football business academy, its work on club structures and corporate governance, and its push to establish clubs and facilities outside Nairobi, where roughly 87% of Kenyans live.
We publish every target, every scoring model and every estimate so we can be argued with — and held to account. If you can deliver part of it better, faster or cheaper, send us a proposal.
54
Kenyan professionals abroad
$88.4M
Combined career valuation
25
Years of talent export
7
Recommended steps
Trustee
The campaign is managed by its founder, who is also its trustee. Reinstated here from the original 2024 statement of the campaign's governance.
Founder and Trustee of the KickStartKenyaFootball campaign
A former professional English footballer and Kenyan international with British-Kenyan heritage. He founded KickStartKenyaFootball and manages the campaign. His playing record and post-playing work are documented in full on his player profile.
Their player profileThe Team In Kenya
The people delivering the work on the ground in Kenya. Every other role on the plan is still open.
Coaching, Kenya · Head Coach, Kenya U-20 women (Rising Starlets)
The first woman appointed head coach of a men's Kenyan Premier League club, taking charge of FC Talanta in August 2024. A former Harambee Starlets international who retired in 2016, she holds the CAF A Licence — one of only two women in Kenya to hold it when she earned it in May 2024 — and is a certified CAF Elite Coach Educator. She has coached Gor Mahia Queens, Gaspo Women, Kayole Starlets and Acakoro Ladies, and the Kenya U-15, U-17 and U-20 girls' national teams.
Her coaching recordOpen positions
Beyond the trustee, these are the roles the organisation needs to run properly. All of them are open, unfilled and unpaid until funding is in place — no appointments have been made. If you have the experience for one of them, or you can fund it, tell us.
Focus areas
Planned county leagues, futsal courts and coach education in every corner of Kenya — so talent is found on merit, not connections.
The Women's Starlets pathway from school pitches to professional contracts, with equal facilities from day one.
Residential places combining football, schooling and pastoral care for children without family support.
Leagues and coaching inside and around Kakuma and Dadaab, treating football as a route to belonging.
Amputee, blind and para football programmes with trained coaches and adapted facilities.
Every project mapped to SDGs 3, 4, 5, 8 and 10, with published annual impact reporting.
Global footprint
The blueprint
Brazil did not become the country of football by building stadiums first. It built a habit — a small-sided, everyday, everywhere game — and the talent followed. Kenya can copy the method, not the myth.
Brazil's 5-a-side game, futsal, took hold in the 1930s and 40s and became the country's real academy. A smaller, heavier ball on a hard court forces close control, quick decisions and hundreds more touches per session than eleven-a-side. Pelé, Zico, Ronaldinho, Ronaldo and Neymar all came through it.
Street and beach football — pelada — meant no one waited for a pitch, a kit or a coach. Play happened on concrete, sand and dirt, in tight spaces, with mixed ages and improvised rules. Skill was invented under pressure rather than drilled in isolation.
From Bangu onwards, workplaces and neighbourhood clubs gave poor players a route in: a job, a pitch and a competitive fixture list. Professionalisation in 1933 turned that route into a career, and by 1958 the national team was a portrait of the whole country.
A futsal court costs a fraction of a full pitch, needs no irrigation and survives daily use. One court can serve a whole estate morning to night, which is why Brazil could scale participation faster than it could ever build stadiums.
Transferable to Kenya
Our milestones are built around the same logic: cheap surfaces, dense participation, and a ladder that a kid in Kibera can actually climb.
Hard-court futsal boxes in every estate
Cheap to build, floodlit, usable all year, and safe for girls and boys to train late.
Coach the small game first
Under-12 development on 5-a-side courts before eleven-a-side, so technique is built by volume of touches.
A real fixture ladder
Estate leagues feeding county leagues feeding the national pathway, with results published and scouted.
Community ownership
Courts held by the community with clear governance, so facilities survive beyond the funding cycle.
Open to every county
Land nobody is using, a school field, a county ground, a real build cost, a grassroots project worth following. Send it in and we will add it to the research with a source.