Globally, sports were primarily played for recreation and camaraderie, with an emphasis on amateurism, a pursuit of passion and, to some extent, glory.
In Kenya, post-secondary school sports were promoted by corporates and big parastatals.
Kenya Power & Lighting Company, Kenya Breweries Limited, Kenya Pipeline Company, Kenya Commercial Bank, and Kenya Port Authority, among others, were key players in bringing out the recreational aspect of sports for their staff.
It was a welfare activity for staff to engage in after work, activities that saw the birth of many corporate sports teams that we still have today.
Thika Road boasts of various sports clubs around the Ruaraka area, including Stima Club, KCB Sports Club, Utalii Sports Club, and ABSA Sports Club, remnants of the welfare activities their mother companies had for their staff.
However, since then, sports have evolved to more than just a recreational sport to a multi-billion industry.
The latter half of the 20th century saw a significant increase in professional sports, driven by advancements in media and technology.
The emergence of satellite television and sports channels in the 1980s and 1990s expanded the audience for sports, leading to more lucrative broadcasting deals and sponsorships.
It’s no longer just an after-work activity for camaraderie or a weight loss activity.
As the big honchos set up sports clubs for their staff's welfare, there was a surge in competition within various industries.
Parastatals had KICOSO games, the Bankers Inter-banks, municipalities were not left behind either, with the disciplined forces probably leading in this area.
It didn’t take long before companies and institutions started hiring top sportsmen and women purely to have a better chance at winning these games.
The recreational purpose of the sporting activity started waning as competition took off.
It has not all been in vain. Some of our best sports performances as a country are products of the ‘recreational’ system for the big companies and parastatals.
Volleyball, specifically the Malkia Strikers, have reaped big from that system as teams recruited the best athletes directly from schools and brought them to compete.
A good number of our medal-winning athletes are employees of either the Kenya Police Service, the Prisons Service or the Kenya Armed Forces, where they were recruited so that they could participate in the force’s games.
This provides salaries for these sportsmen and women while spending 80 to 90 per cent of their time at the training camps.
The same applies to the Kenya Pipeline women's volleyball team, the KCB women's Volleyball team, Tusker FC, Kenya Police FC, Bandari FC and others.
The players and technical bench members, by extension, are salaried employees, mostly without a real day job other than being in the sports field, hence making them professional.
However, the world has moved on, and sports is a business. Global sports insights in a recent report using the Best-Howard model suggest the industry's revenue could be as high as $2.65 trillion in 2025.
Athletes, individually, have not been left behind either. Superstars continue to land lucrative endorsement deals with different companies, sometimes earning more off the field than they do on the field.
Locally, sprint sensation Ferdinand Omanyala seems to have struck the right balance for that and continues to reap from endorsement deals.
However, many of our sports federations, leagues, clubs and athletes are stuck in the old way of doing sports. Depending on government handouts and small donations from corporate companies and well-wishers.
No meaningful revenue from gate collections nor any television deal worth mentioning.
Have you noticed how the sports bullet-in has evolved? A few years ago, sports came in at 9.30 pm after the main news.
It contained video footage from various local sports. Today, sports news, if any, will come at about 10 pm, and rarely do we get any video footage.
Yet, in 2024, the global value of sports media rights surpassed USD 62.61 billion. Why is it that 60 years after independence, there is yet a broadcaster equipped to air Live sports?
Kenyan fans are watching and paying to watch quality sports on TV. That revenue unfortunately is going to a foreign broadcaster and benefiting foreign leagues. Meanwhile, the ‘Serekali Saidia’ chorus rages on.
There is a need for the entire sports fraternity to embrace a business mindset – it is beneficial to the athletes, the clubs and the federations.
The writer is the CEO of Inter Management Group (IMG Kenya).
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