Young footballers could do with quality coaching

Cubs get their campaign underway against Angola after two good camps in Turkey and Kenya. PHOTO: FUFA MEDIA

For Fufa, who had to adopt a more bellicose stance toward topflight clubs that were not so keen on having under-17 entities (of which there were many), there surely must be a sense of vindication. All but one of the players Uganda Cubs coach Samuel Kwesi Fabin will have at his disposal in Dar es Salaam figure in the Fufa Juniors League.

This has oxygenated talk that grassroots football matters a great deal. Of course it does! But the dawning of that realization has always proven to be the easy part. The hard part is how to decisively deal with the football coach shortage that continues to paint a bleak picture for Uganda’s future. The devil is in the detail in this particular case.

Now whilst numbers supposedly don’t bleed, the ones regarding football coaches in Uganda do quite an extensive haemorrhaging job. The numbers invite a lot of pessimism.

Here is why: there are 8,150 active footballers in Uganda. Not bad, you’d think. Also the sum total of 3,509 coaches should not set off siren calls. Well, until you do some number crunching.

Feats on the global stage place great store on quality coaching. Sadly for Uganda, the numbers just don’t add up. We have a paltry 40 CAF A licensed coaches. Sixty-four have CAF B licences with a further 46 certified as CAF C coaches. The rest are endorsed by Fufa — 859 of them at Level One and 2500 at Beginners.

The ratio of coaches with CAF A and B qualifications to players stands at 1:78. Not quite Armageddon, but neither soothing. It gets more vexing when one looks at the young player development pathway. Players who have been better coached from a very young age are usually equipped with technical, physical and mental skills needed to succeed at the highest international level. That’s a given.

The poor resource of qualified coaches, however, means that not much headway is made when it comes to youth development. This notwithstanding the increasing stream of young players being spewed by the Fufa Juniors League and other youth competitions. The link between coaching and quality will always be apparent.

This is why Fufa should decree, just as it does with the Uganda Premier League, that coaches with CAF A and B qualifications ply their trade in the Fufa Juniors League. The formative stage is quite fundamental to be left to the care of those who are essentially learning the ropes of coaching (the basic requirement for the Juniors League is that one must have attended a Fifa Youth coaching course annually held at the Fufa Technical Centre in Njeru).

During the heady days of the Kampala Kids League, precocious talents like Dan Serunkuma, Ibrahim Sadam Juma, Mike Mutyaba and Juma Balinya were not unearthed by accident. The presence of competent coaches like Eddie Butindo pretty much ensured that there would be no domino effect of loss perpetuating loss. Are coaches of such a very high calibre still doing the business in the trenches of age grade football? Your guess is as good as mine.