By Fred Mwalo,

The football season is fast coming to a close and it’s a common thing to see many football clubs calling for trials. Mass axing and mass signing will become the order of the day. Another common occurrence at this time is the mass recycling of same players ( and coaches ) from one team to another.

A few new talent may emerge here and there from the lower leagues or the neighbouring countries as well. You always wonder what exactly is expected of failures or less successful players from another team by their new clubs.

But before I delve deeper I want to ask myself, why do Kenyan football clubs always conduct mass trials at the beginning of every season?

It would be understandable if we were talking about young raw talent for the reserve/ youth team. But these trials are meant to recruit for the first team. As the name suggests this system is a trial and error & chances for success are as high as chances for failure.

Surprisingly we have stuck to this method of recruitment ever since football as a sport landed in this country. Are our coaches and scouts too lazy to go round identifying and the players they need? On average every season a Kenyan football club signs 10-15 players and releases about the same number to create room.

The other downside of this apart from the massive waste of time & resources is that it creates instability in the squad. Teams are constantly in a rebuilding process and by the time they just about start to get to understand each other and the coach’s methods another transfer window is open & same cycle repeats itself.

In an ideal situation I would expect that the coach should have identified areas in the squad that need improvement and as the season goes on together with his technical bench & management they have identified possible targets. Once the season ends they embark on acquiring their targets. This in a way would help to ensure that the squad gets better every transfer window.

There have been allegations of how the “trials ” system of recruitment is being abused by local coaches & some club officials and maybe this explains why this method has remained so popular despite its obvioous ineffectiveness. There have been reports that some coaches take kick backs to allow players to come in for trials with their clubs. Some players even pay to be “selected”.

Then there are reports of players who cede a percentage of their signing fees to some club officials. Don’t you always wonder why a club signs 10 players only to drop 7 of them after 6 months and sign another 10?

Some of the reasons some teams, most teams maybe, do not progress is because we have stuck to the old ways of doing things and expect better results every time. I always say that if our game is to develop, we must work on all aspects of the game. We must rethink how we go about recruiting the most critical part of a football club, the players. It is time we dedicate more effort & resources to recruitment and also embrace modern methods of recruitment if we want to see a higher quality of players in our leagues.

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