Not beyond us to Excel

Without any sponsorship Patrick has toiled, taking bus rides to Mbarara and Gulu to watch barefooted kids play under the scorching sun, picking the best.

Uganda’s football fraternity is given to turning on the telly, watching Bayern Munich rip Barcelona to shreds as a result of years of painstaking plotting, and adopting absolutely nothing from the whole show.

It is a reflection of our society too as exemplified by, say, our politicians and technocrats partaking of those mazy road networks complete with multiple lanes, flyovers, bicycle tracks and pedestrian walks etc in Hong Kong or Singapore, and then returning to our pot-holed, muddy paths without a word.

The bitter truth is that we believe the really nice things belong elsewhere. Many have concluded that the beautiful weather of tropical Africa got us complacent as opposed to elsewhere where biting winters, hurricanes, tsunamis, infertile soils etc got people really thinking, necessity being the mother of invention and all.

Is this why Patrick Gwayambadde, having lived in Europe where nothing comes easy and people dedicate entire lifetimes to chasing after and actually realising dreams, is onto something big with his Excel Academy?

Patrick’s U-10 kids have just returned from Spain with ‘fairy tales’ of being tutored by Barcelona coaches, touching Lionel Messi’s Golden Boots at the Camp Nou, watching Mallorca’s B Team in action and all else.

He secured that trip through contacts who run football tours across Europe, has another to the UK lined up for his U-12s through his ‘mates’ at Chelsea, Arsenal and Fulham, and an invite from the US where women’s soccer is huge, for which he is soliciting the help of Toro princess Ruth Komuntale to get girls to come and play.

The Barcelona coaches are in turn coming here and take a look, as will others from the UK, and some of kids ending up with those clubs is not the stuff of make-believe.

Without any sponsorship Patrick has toiled, taking bus rides to Mbarara and Gulu to watch barefooted kids play under the scorching sun, picking the best.

The concept is not alien and the success stories of West Africa and Latin America started the same way.

These initiatives don’t work only for Barcelona or Bayern; they ought to be incorporated in the 2040 vision, accommodated in a policy drawn up by the Ministry Of Sports and the NCS, and embraced long term by a Fufa which currently assembles a collection of poorly nurtured late developers for a few days and expects them to take Uganda to the World Cup.

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