Why East Africa’s Stadium Boom Needs a Grassroots Engine
FEATURED BLOG
Why East Africa’s Stadium Boom Needs a Grassroots Engine
—
Oct 2025
East African countries, particularly Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania, are pouring serious money into new stadiums ahead of AFCON 2027, Africa's premier football championship, hoping to spark a football renaissance. Kenya’s investment is the most ambitious, with the proposed 60,000-seat Talanta Sports City valued at roughly USD 341M and broader CHAN and AFCON works projected to exceed USD 441M. Uganda has a new 20,000-seat national stadium rising in Hoima at about USD 130M, and Tanzania has set aside around USD 73M in the 2025–2026 budget just for AFCON-related stadium construction and renovation. These are bold bets. The uncomfortable question is who will fill these arenas, as players and as paying fans, if the base of the pyramid (i.e., grassroot systems) remains weak. The missing link lies at the foundation of the game: the grassroots ecosystem that identifies, trains, and sustains young talent.
Defining "Grassroots" in Context
Grassroots development covers a young player’s path from first training to professional ranks, anchored by school and community club participation, qualified coaching, scouted youth leagues, and clear routes into elite academies and senior teams. After independence in the late 1950s–1960s, many West and North African states made deliberate, nation-building investments in grassroots football. While colonial ties did shape early migration routes into Europe, particularly from Francophone and Lusophone Africa, the decisive factor in West and North Africa was deliberate policy, not history. Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah invited foreign expertise and high-profile visits to inspire local players.
As early as 1938, Nigerian nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe formed Zik's Athletic Club (ZAC), a sports-club in Lagos, to fuse sport with a pan-African independence ethos. Côte d'Ivoire's most successful club, ASEC Mimosas ran academy partnerships that integrated education with competitive play and streamlined transfers. Morocco invested heavily in sports infrastructure and coach development, becoming one of the earliest African countries to host AFCON in 1988. These examples show that talent pipelines don’t emerge spontaneously; they require intentional, long-term policy.
By contrast, East Africa, despite hosting Africa's oldest tournament, the Gossage Cup (now CECAFA Cup), has seen the tournament fail to grow in prestige over time. Analysts attribute this to a lack of development of the game, including at grassroots level, in the region. So how does East Africa's grassroots infrastructure compare to its regional peers, and what does the data reveal about its development gaps?
East Africa Compared to Its Peers
One of the strongest signals of a healthy system is the depth and density of licensed coaches. Kenya had just 49 CAF A-licensed (elite) coaches as recently as 2022, too few to saturate top clubs, let alone youth pathways—while the federation reports 7,000+ coaches trained across 2016–2023, raising access but not solving progression, mentoring, and retention gaps. Uganda’s ecosystem still leans heavily on volunteer-run academies, and regulators are pushing minimum standards because many youth setups lack qualified staff and structure. By contrast, North and West African models pair player pipelines with systematic coach education: academies such as ASEC Mimosas and Diambars institutionalize year-to-year learning under experienced, licensed coach-educators, and Morocco has made coach education a strategic priority alongside player development.
Perhaps the clearest comparison is how many players progress from grassroots to elite football. In 2021, an audit of Europe’s top leagues counted Senegal (62), Morocco (55), Nigeria (54), Côte d’Ivoire (50), and Ghana (46)—with no East African football association among the top contributors. This matters because Europe remains the sport’s richest shop window, with the European football market valued at USD 44 B in 2023-2024. When African prospects make it to these leagues, the FIFA Solidarity Mechanism channels up to 5% of transfer fees back to the player’s training clubs creating a built-in reward for grassroots academies. Meanwhile, East Africa’s academy-to-pro ladder is still under construction. Kenya’s football federation has publicly flagged the gap between school stars and a defined next step and is building a nationwide scouting database to track progression. In Uganda, the federation is rewriting the league format for 2025-2026, another sign of a pathway being rebuilt mid-season rather than a settled pipeline. Without predictable progression, clubs and investors face higher scouting costs and weaker returns, a hidden tax on the ecosystem.
Now the key question becomes: as East Africa ramps up spending on new stadiums and sports centers (a commendable move, to be sure), how will this infrastructure be connected to the weak grassroots base we just described? In other words, will new venues help grow the talent pipeline, or will they risk becoming empty monuments? This question is critical, and it leads us to examine the next theme.
Why the Grassroots Gap Matters Even More During an Infrastructure Boom
One of the reasons infrastructure can disappoint is that construction often outpaces the people and programs needed to animate them. For example, South Africa upgraded or built venues for the 2010 World Cup at a cost of about USD 3.7B, yet matchday attendance outside marquee fixtures sagged in the years that followed, and Cape Town’s 54,000-seat stadium became a recurring budget burden, reportedly costing about USD 3.1M per year to maintain while often sitting underused. Gabon offers a similar warning: for example, a stadium intended for AFCON 2017 was not completed on time despite more than USD 200M spent, and a 2012 training centre that briefly hosted an academy closed after public funding was cut. When youth systems aren’t built in parallel with infrastructure, the venues lack the living content that keeps them relevant beyond opening day and the promise of transformation dissolves into recurring maintenance bills. East Africa’s current trajectory, rapid capital spending without parallel social investment, risks repeating those same patterns.
Another reason to marry infrastructure with programs is that performance depends on long human-development cycles. For example, South Africa retained world-class facilities and one of the continent’s richest leagues, yet uneven youth development saw the national teams stall for stretches, junior sides struggle to qualify, and only a handful of regulars emerge in top European leagues. Morocco shows a different arc. The country built the Mohammed VI National Academy, invested in regional centres, scaled coach education, and expanded nationwide scouting, and those choices fed directly into a historic men’s World Cup semifinal run in 2022 and rapid gains in the women’s game. The lesson for East Africa is clear: if stadiums double as year-round academies, coaching campuses, and youth-league homes, the concrete accelerates progress; if they stand apart from the grassroots, the gap between infrastructure and results only widens.
If East Africa strengthens its grassroots while it builds the stages, the crowd will not only come; it will recognize its young talent on the pitch, and the renaissance promised by AFCON 2027 will have the roots to last.