KCCA Football Club is making the right noises

It’s the week after qualification, and the superstitious among KCCA fans must be collectively willing themselves not to stare at the Caf website for news on the Confederation first round draws slated for April 26, 2017. To look would mean to bring upon oneself a lot of bad luck, but infatuation has no room for such sentiments.
And it is easy to be obsessed with KCCA these days. For one, they will for the next six to nine months continue to feed our appetite for continental football, an addiction we re-ignited in Gabon last January and whose cravings cannot be fixed by national team football alone.
Secondly, I must say KCCA Football Club appears to be doing all the right things. This is evident in its technical staff, player recruitment and development, under-age teams, sponsorship and commerce, and in such subtle matters like the way they go about promoting their home games.
Talking of which, they seem to also be making the right noises and on the increasingly important matter of public relations, KCCA is evidently a trail blazer, and is head and shoulders above the rest. I suspect they have figured that in today’s world driven by an insatiable appetite for instant information, one needs to have a huge social media presence.
Of course, information could mean anything. It could be scandal or idle gossip. That tends to sell a lot as matter of fact.
But for KCCA, if it isn’t the team decked in club colors visiting the pyramids of Giza, or ailing 1980’s superstar Issa Ssekatawa, it is the club in a post-match training session at a time when logic would dictate that they post pictures of the after-party following qualification and the guarantee of a Shs1b purse.
This awareness by KCCA, of the intersections of information and progress, is a clear indication of how much it is understood by them, on what it will take to grow.
In its path will lay the structural and mindset shortcomings of our society, accumulated over the years and now part of our moral fiber. And reversing a generation’s worth of internal programming will be no cakewalk.
Clubs must force themselves to cross the divide between the structures they want to see and the socio-economic realities of those they must engage with, which for instance, means that we are still unable to make the connection between complimentary matchday tickets and the ability to grow our clubs.
But this, as KCCA is slowly revealing to us, can be achieved by information and education. And it doesn’t matter that KCCA is operating out of the narrow base of social-media, word of mouth carries the message to a broader audience eventually. And there are glimmers of hope already.
Club biases aside, I live for moments like these – KCCA and its pretensions at structural soundness starting to deliver results like the qualification of last week. It may be early days and the challenges remain many, but there are few more inspiring examples than those closer to home.

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MBanturaki