A football pitch
In Kenya, discussions about job creation often center on traditional sectors such as agriculture, textiles, or food.
These industries are typically examined through a value chain lens, beginning with demand and tracing backward to uncover gaps in productivity and areas where strategic interventions could unlock income and employment.
While this approach has been valuable, not all sectors fit into it so neatly.
One notable exception is sports, which, although deeply embedded in the country’s cultural fabric, has remained largely untapped as an economic platform.
Sports in Kenya are widely loved and passionately followed. From football and athletics to rugby and increasingly basketball, it inspires loyalty and emotional investment across generations.
People speak about their favorite teams and athletes with great pride. Social media lights up during major tournaments, and screenings of Premier League matches draw massive crowds.
Yet, despite this energy and engagement, the local sports ecosystem remains underdeveloped and commercially underdeveloped.
Even legendary clubs like Gor Mahia and AFC Leopards, with their loyal fanbases and rich histories, operate without the business infrastructure one might expect.
Local content creation around sports is often focused on international teams and community leagues, which are vibrant, but they rarely generate sustainable economic activity.
This mismatch between interest and opportunity arises from a narrow definition of the sports economy.
It is still primarily viewed as a performance sector centered around athletes, trophies, federations, and occasional high-profile events.
Fan culture, match-day experiences, creative energy, and micro-businesses are treated as incidental, informal, or secondary.
What’s missing isn’t demand, but the infrastructure needed to absorb, multiply, and convert that demand into economic value.
If this infrastructure existed, countless young people could be building businesses around the games they already love.
Sports, unlike many enabling sectors, create a reciprocal relationship with other industries.
While roads, electricity, or mobile networks unlock productivity in a one-way flow, sports grow stronger the more other sectors plug into them.
On match days, a wide array of economic activity unfolds as vendors sell snacks, musicians perform, designers showcase merchandise, transport providers move fans, and digital content creators capture the buzz.
These aren’t peripheral activities—they are integral to the experience. A game without music, food, fanwear, and social media chatter would be hollow.
Technology also finds fertile ground in the sports world. Developers can test apps, streaming services, ticketing platforms, and performance analytics tools during games.
Young designers and media teams can turn matches into dynamic showcases for their work. These possibilities extend beyond elite levels.
Community and hobby sports generate demand for coaches, fitness trainers, nutritionists, physiotherapists, and local event organizers.
While often informal, these roles represent a hidden segment of the economy, one that could flourish with proper support.
What makes sports particularly powerful is its ability not only to enable value creation but also to absorb and amplify it.
The more food, fashion, tech, wellness, and media integrate into the sporting experience, the more compelling and economically valuable the ecosystem becomes.
Unlike infrastructure, which fades into the background once operational, sports grow more engaging the more visible and participatory they become.
For this reason, sports should not be viewed as an isolated sector but rather as a platform capable of hosting a vibrant, distributed economy.
Despite all this potential, the system remains fragmented. Local clubs, even the most prominent ones, lack commercial strategies and fan engagement models.
Corporate sponsorships tend to be superficially focused on visibility rather than co-creation. They put logos on jerseys, sponsor one-off tournaments, or provide funding just before major events.
There is little investment in helping clubs become platforms or in designing holistic fan experiences.
As a result, athletes often train without reliable income, and community leagues lack structure or continuity.
Young entrepreneurs who could build businesses around these events find no predictable infrastructure to support them.
The result is a cycle of waiting. Clubs wait for sponsors. Sponsors wait for a broader reach. Fans wait for better experiences. Entrepreneurs wait for access. But no one moves because no one has built the mechanism to bring all these elements together.
The genuine opportunity in sports lies not just in producing elite athletes but in building the economy that surrounds the game.
There is value in the vendors at neighborhood pitches, the youth-run media teams covering tournaments, the coaches and physiotherapists training school teams, and the designers making fanwear.
Even the young people running WhatsApp-based fantasy leagues or selling branded merchandise on the sidelines are part of a larger, informal economy.
If designed intentionally, this ecosystem could create more than 100,000 jobs across various sectors, including technology, retail, wellness, logistics, creative industries, and food.
Achieving this vision will require a fundamental shift in how investment in sports is approached.
Currently, most funding is directed toward the top for national teams, elite talent, and high-profile events.
These are important and worthy of celebration, but they serve only a small fraction of those engaged with the sector.
Thousands of athletes train in Iten without a clear income pathway. Community football leagues operate on shoestring budgets.
Basketball and rugby attract significant passion but face chronic funding gaps. The ecosystem around these sports remains fragmented and unsupported.
What is missing is not energy or passion—it is system design. Sponsors need to move beyond mere visibility and begin co-building ecosystems by supporting local media teams, funding match-day businesses, or enhancing fan experiences.
Clubs must be seen as anchor institutions, central to a broader web of economic activity.
Governments and development funders should recognize sports as a financial platform with the power to drive youth employment across multiple sectors, not merely as a soft-power gesture or a source of national pride.
By fostering a well-designed system that connects local sports ecosystems to global networks, young talent can gain visibility and access to international opportunities.
This could involve partnerships with global sports organizations, scouts, and leagues, enabling promising athletes and professionals in related fields to showcase their skills on a larger stage.
The integration of technology, such as streaming local matches and creating digital profiles for athletes, can amplify their reach, offering a pathway to more lucrative assignments abroad.
This is not a call to commodify joy or to over-professionalize what people do for love.
It is a call to take seriously what already exists and to create infrastructure and investment strategies that reflect the true potential of the sports economy.
By doing so, when the next Omanyala or Kipchoge emerges, the system and value chains around them will be ready to support tens of thousands more in their footsteps.
The article was co-authored byLiesbeth Bakker from CASBI – Centre for Applied Sciences & Business Innovation
