Uganda Rugby was recently hit with the bombshell of Black Pearls’ decision to withdraw from the Women’s top-flight league this season.
It was the kind of news that reverberated across the rugby fraternity, sending shock-waves around the game. The Black Pearls are not your also-runs kind of team. Although they were established in 2017, they are currently four-time league defending champions, with their last title coming in 2025.
In addition, they boast of contributing almost the biggest number of athletes to the women’s national team. Therefore, losing them at this particular moment, is as critical to the sport of rugby, perhaps even bigger than who succeeds as the Uganda Rugby president after Godwin Kayangwe.
At the moment, the Black Pearls are the ones in the news for doing what many consider the unthinkable (a seemingly model club withdrawing from all rugby activities), but a lot more clubs could be following a similar pattern soon.
The question now is how to avoid this happening again? It is clubs like the Black Pearls that are the heartbeat of the sport; without them, then the national teams will have no players.
Yet, for the current situation to unravel, it has been longtime coming. The Black Pearls struggled through last season, although matters came to ahead when they withdraw from the Uganda Cup, together with their main rivals, the Thunderbirds last year.
The Uganda Cup was played between October and December. But for Black Pearls to withdraw then, there were signs from the National Sevens championships, which ran in August and September, that the team was struggling to have all the players they needed to take part.
You see, Black Pearls have players in different parts of the country, particularly because a number of them are students. So, ensuring that they are together for training before a major game requires logistics.
Black Pearls played the first round of the women’s top-flight, showing signs of competitiveness, as they were locked in near the top of the log alongside Thunderbirds and Avengers.
Yet, now that they have withdrawn, the league has remained with six teams. But a seasoned competitor has been lost, which affects the growth of the game. Black Pearls coach Koyokoyo Buteme said: “It has been a very tough period for us because we had no money. At the beginning of the season, we were informed we would receive Shs 10 million from the sponsors. But we have only received Shs 4 million.”
However, just one game, either to Jinja or Mbale cost Shs 2 million. Essentially, that meant, the Black Pearls had to find other sources of revenue, which Buteme said that have tried endlessly but failed.
Just last weekend, the Kakira Simbas rugby club also failed to travel for their league game against Black Pirates. Before then, Warriors rugby club also did not honour a fixture, citing financial constraint.
Erasmus Aredo, the Head of Operations at Warriors noted that the overheads are proving very high for them to sustain their 45- man squad. Here is a club that pays tuition for its players, offers medical insurance to them, and also has to pay them a wage to keep going.
“It has become a lot harder for us now that we lost major sponsors like Dusupay, Nine Barrells and Mutoni Construction, before,” Aredo said.
It should be noted, that for a men’s club side to travel one weekend to Jinja and the next to Entebbe for league games, at least Shs 5 million must be in place at the bear minimum. Looking at the structure of the league, hardly that can be grossed from gate collections.
Without more sponsorship, rugby is destined for a more dire future. In the men’s top-flight, only four teams have individual sponsorship. Much of the league relies on the title sponsors Nile Special.
May be, for the greater good of the sport and its long term sustainability, a government austerity measure is inevitable. Recently, the National Council of Sports General Secretary, Bernard Ogwel announced a Shs 5.5 billion fund to the Uganda Premier League clubs, to aid in preparing the players better for The Cranes.
In light of that, Prossy Nakakande, the Uganda Rugby Women’s Representative Executive member said that she did not know how sustainable that would be. But she hastily acknowledged that they appreciate the challenges Black Pearls and other teams have had to contend with.
She added that as Uganda Rugby, they are trying their best to get more sponsorship into club rugby for sustainability. Yet, regarding government money going into club rugby, too, they have never received a green light to that effect.
According to some observers, they feel that it is senseless to inject all government money into national teams, when there are no clubs to produce players: That is what the Black Pearls situation has created!
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