Sport is over 600bn USD economy bigger than the aviation industry.
This has largely been achieved by packaging sports events via television and the wider electronic media to the masses.
In the process, many brands have paid sports to carry their commercial messages to the same audiences.
Considering that Ugandan football is not partaking, of that huge world sports economy, it is now FUFA’s long term strategy to take football to Television and the Digital media.
FUFA and its Members intend to produce and broadcast high quality live and recorded content of lots of the football events. More Ugandan football is coming to the Living Rooms, Offices, Bibanda, Schools, Restaurants and Bars.
This will automatically generate more resources for the game from the associating brands.
In the past, FUFA was not able to sell the commercial rights of the FUFA Women Competitions and Regional Promotions but had sold the commercial rights of the Uganda Cup at 300m UGX (85,000 USD) to Stanbic Bank and 132m UGX (37,000 USD) to Plascon.
FUFA has not been able to sell the Broadcast (Media) rights of the FUFA Women Competitions, Regional Promotions and the Uganda Cup.
Considering that when COVID-19 SOPs required to play matches without fans, FUFA thought it was prudent to take the games to the sitting rooms of the fans.
The objective was to keep the football competitions and clubs’ brands alive as we navigate COVID through continued association with the fans.
Secondly, FUFA has taken the strategy to add value to the rights and make them ready for consumption.
Step by step, FUFA will package the Uganda football product from just selling the right to be filmed to a high-quality electric or electromagnetic or optical signal of live and recorded football events.
This is what many Ugandan brands can and wish to buy not sponsorships.
In doing this, definitely we are stepping on some business toes that have benefitted from FUFA’s failure hitherto to occupy our place on the table.
Nevertheless, the football stakeholders and entire football loving public should remain assured that FUFA and its Members, as has always been the case, know which buttons to press to deliver this dream.
Live Ugandan Sports on Television and Digital Platforms is a game changer that will radiate Uganda Sports industry into an economic sector employing Ugandans, paying taxes and used as import substitution.
In most corporate organisations, the media advertising budget and the Sponsorship budget are managed differently.
The practice is for the Advertisers to allocate Media Houses annual media budget for their adverts.
This implies that advertisers have no extra budget for paying for adverts in live football matches.
Therefore, Media Houses do not need live football to make the money already allocated to them.
Whereas raising value and hence more revenues is the main objective, FUFA wishes to achieve other objectives such as; extend viewership of the FUFA Competitions to Homesteads, Offices, Bars, Schools and all other places where masses of people collect., build the brands of FUFA, Competitions, Clubs, Coaches, Players and Referees, use the media content for; performance analysis of the players and referees, archiving, education, second opinion on matters missed by the match officials and disciplinary actions.
Fact-file about FUFA’s competitions on TV
FUFA through its partners has been able to produce and air live a total of 133 matches that included the FUFA Big League Qualifiers, Uganda Cup, FUFA Women Super League and FUFA Women elite League broadcast on Facebook live, UBC, Star TV and BBS TV.
Anyone stepping in the way of this process of taking football to Television is an enemy to the sport.
As usual, lies, mudslinging and distortions of facts will be placed where they belong with a successful project that FUFA has embarked on.
What we need now are roles and synergies not detractions and false name callings.
It is Our Game, It is Our Country.
Ahmed Hussein
FUFA Communications Director
ahussein@fufauganda.com
