Mathare United honcho, Bob Munro, has lashed out at the Football Kenya Federation Caretaker Committee for allegedly accelerating their downfall in the country's top tier.
The Slum Boys are dangling precariously on the cusp of relegation after dishing out three consecutive walkovers, albeit unwillingly, to Bandari, Ulinzi and Sofapaka respectively.
The FKF rules stipulate that a club risks relegation after forfeiting three matches.
In a club statement issued late Monday, , Munro described the Caretaker Committee's assistance as too little too late, adding that the two batches of Sh300,000 grants disbursed to clubs couldn't have done much to salvage them from their financial woes.
“On December 22, 2021, our club sent a detailed note to the FKF Caretaker Committee on the escalating “Financial Instability of Most FKF PL Clubs”. A senior official replied that “we are working with the Ministry to resolve and ensure that no club collapses over financial instability,” read the statement in part.
“But in the last six months since they took over, our clubs received only two grants for a total of Ksh 600,000 which is less than a club’s costs for two upcountry matches. Tragically for our clubs, players and sport, the FKF Caretaker Committee has largely ignored the “Care” in the first half of its title and mandate,” Munro said in his statement.
Undue expansion of the top tier from 16 to 18 teams not only increased financial burden on local clubs, but also forced Supersport out of the Sh8m annual sponsorship deal it had sealed with local clubs, Munro said.
“The decline in club’s TV and title rights revenue is an example of the continuously growing gap between our clubs’ decreasing revenue and increasing costs. By 2017, each club received annual KPL grants of Ksh 8m to 9m.”
“But five years later, despite rapidly rising costs and FKF’s promise of Ksh 10m to 12m annually for each club, the actual FKF grants to each club for the 2020-21 season were still only Ksh 8.6m,” Munro’s statement said.
Editing by Tony Mballa
