FUFA believes Uganda’s future international football stars are already emerging through the academies system, with the newly introduced Academies League expected to become a key platform for tracking their development and preparing them for national-team duty.
Robert Kiwanuka, FUFA National Chairperson for Youth and Academies, says the competition offers an important opportunity to monitor young players as they progress towards higher levels of the game, including the FIFA World Cup and the CECAFA Under-17 tournament in Rwanda.
“When you look at the composition and importance of the Academies League, most of the players developed through this competition are the ones you are going to see at the World Cup and in Rwanda for the CECAFA Under-17 tournament,” Kiwanuka said.
His comments point to FUFA’s wider ambition of establishing a more deliberate connection between academy football and national-team development, using regular competition to assess players’ readiness for international challenges.
“For us as organisers of the Academies League, this is a great opportunity to monitor the development and pathway of these players,” he added.
The inaugural edition, which was restricted to Kampala as a pilot project, provided FUFA with an opportunity to test the competition before taking it nationwide.
Kiwanuka says the next step is to extend participation to all eight regions of Uganda and bring Premier League clubs into the competition, widening the pool of players available for assessment.
“Our target is to ensure that the competition continues in every region next year. This edition was just a startup and a pilot project for Kampala, as we wanted to see how everything would work,” he explained.
The proposed structure will retain the home-and-away league format, with each region expected to produce its strongest academy for a national mini-tournament to determine the overall champion.
“Regarding the format, we will maintain the same home-and-away system because this is a league,” Kiwanuka said.
The first edition concluded with St Mary’s Kitende Soccer Academy edging Prosper Soccer Academy 1-0 in the final to become the competition’s inaugural champions.
While Kitende claimed the first title, FUFA’s bigger objective is to establish a nationwide development platform through which emerging players can be followed, assessed and prepared for the demands of representative football.
The success of that ambition will ultimately depend on how effectively the expanded competition turns academy potential into players capable of delivering for Uganda on the international stage.
