The pitch where fair play goes to die: Kenya’s competition law, the beautiful game, and the federations that prefer cartels to contests
The Mt Kenya Times 
By Jerameel Kevins Owuor Odhiambo
In 2010 Kenya repealed its outdated 1989 competition statute and enacted the Competition Act (Cap. 504). The statute’s object is unambiguous: enhance the welfare of Kenyans by promoting and protecting effective competition in markets and preventing unfair and misleading market conduct. It applies to every undertaking and every association of undertakings in the Republic. Clubs are undertakings.
Federations are associations of undertakings. The market for football, basketball and rugby talent, sponsorship, broadcasting rights, stadium access and fan entertainment is therefore subject to the same prohibitions that bind banks, telecoms and cement producers. Section 21 outlaws agreements, decisions and concerted practices whose object or effect is to prevent, distort or lessen competition.
Section 22 specifically targets trade associations that exclude participants or recommend prices or terms. Section 24 forbids abuse of dominance. These are not optional courtesies. They are the law. Yet for more than a decade the Competition Authority of Kenya has largely looked the other way while sports federations have treated the pitch as private fiefdom.
That is the factual starting point. The issue is not abstract theory. It is the daily reality that young players from Kibera or Kakamega discover when a federation rule, opaque and unchallengeable, decides who may play, who may transfer, who may broadcast a match, and who may profit from the spectacle the public pays for. Competition law was written to stop exactly this kind of private regulation of a market. In Kenyan sport it has been allowed to sleep while the gatekeepers stayed awake.
Consider football, the nation’s de facto religion. The Football Kenya Federation sits at the apex of a pyramid of clubs, county associations and leagues. Its decisions determine which teams enter the Premier League, which players are eligible, how transfer windows operate, and on what terms commercial rights are sold.
When the federation issues regulations without the constitutional process required by its own statutes, as the Sports Disputes Tribunal has repeatedly found in recent seasons, it is not merely internal mismanagement. It is an association of undertakings imposing binding rules that can exclude competitors, raise barriers to entry, and allocate markets. The same logic applies when clubs collude, through the federation or outside it, on player wages, ticket prices or sponsorship terms. Section 22 was drafted for precisely such associations. The Authority has pursued clearing agents and professional bodies for price recommendations; it has shown far less appetite for the football equivalent.
Basketball and rugby tell parallel stories, only quieter. The Kenya Basketball Federation runs the national league. Eligibility rules, fixture control and playoff qualification are its exclusive domain. When results are manipulated or players fielded in breach of the federation’s own regulations, as past Sports Disputes Tribunal cases have recorded, the competitive process itself is distorted. Rugby, organised under the Kenya Rugby Union, operates a smaller but equally closed market of clubs and provincial unions. Exclusive arrangements with sponsors or broadcasters, restrictive transfer clauses, or the quiet blackballing of clubs that challenge the hierarchy all sit squarely within the Competition Act’s prohibitions. Dominance is not measured only by market share of fifty percent; it is measured by the practical ability to act independently of competitors and consumers. A national federation that alone licenses clubs, alone sanctions competitions, and alone sells national-team rights is dominant by any serious reading of Section 23.
History sharpens the irony. Kenya was among the first African states to adopt a competition statute in 1989. The 2010 Act modernized the regime, created an independent Authority, introduced merger control, and later strengthened rules against abuse of buyer power and professional associations. The OECD’s peer review of Kenya’s competition policy has noted the progress. Yet the same Authority that processes over a hundred merger notifications a year and opens dozens of behavioural investigations has left the sports market largely untouched. Trade associations that fix cargo tariffs are fined and forced into compliance programmes. Sports associations that fix the terms of athletic labour and commercial spectacle are left to the Sports Registrar and the Sports Disputes Tribunal bodies designed for governance and discipline, not for market analysis.
The human cost is not theoretical. A talented midfielder whose transfer is blocked by an arbitrary federation rule loses income, exposure and career trajectory. A basketball club locked out of the national league because it refused to accept opaque financial demands loses sponsors and fans. Rugby players who challenge the union’s commercial monopoly find themselves frozen out of national selection. Fans pay inflated ticket prices or are denied high-quality broadcasts because exclusive rights deals face no competition-law scrutiny. Sponsors who might have entered the market are deterred by the closed nature of the gatekeeping. The market for Kenyan sporting talent becomes a monopsony on the demand side and a series of local monopolies on the supply side. Competition law exists to prevent exactly this extraction of surplus from players, clubs and the public.
The defence offered by the federations is always the same: sport is special; autonomy is sacred; FIFA, FIBA and World Rugby demand independence from ordinary law. That defence collapses under scrutiny. Competition law does not prohibit legitimate sporting rules necessary for the organisation of competitions fair play, integrity, calendar coordination. It prohibits rules whose object or effect is the prevention, distortion or lessening of competition beyond what is strictly necessary.
The European Commission and national authorities across the continent have applied this distinction for decades. Kenya’s statute contains the same tools. Exemptions under Section 25 exist precisely for arrangements that produce public benefits outweighing competitive harm. Federations that believe their rules are justified should apply for exemption and subject their claims to evidence. They have not.
What is required now is not polite suggestion but categorical action. The Competition Authority must open market inquiries into the organisation of professional and semi-professional football, basketball and rugby. It must examine player contract terms for restrictive covenants that go beyond legitimate sporting needs. It must scrutinize broadcasting and sponsorship exclusivity for foreclosure effects. It must treat federation regulations that exclude clubs or players without transparent, proportionate criteria as decisions of associations of undertakings.
The Ministry of Youth Affairs, Sports and the Arts must stop treating competition law as an alien intrusion and recognise that a healthy sports market is a public good. The Sports Registrar must condition registration and continued recognition of national federations on demonstrable compliance with the Competition Act. Clubs and players’ associations must stop accepting closed-shop arrangements as inevitable and begin filing complaints. Parliament, when it finally enacts the long-promised sports reforms, must insert an explicit duty of cooperation between the Sports Regulatory bodies and the Competition Authority.
The alternative is continued decay. Kenya produces some of the world’s finest athletes, yet its domestic leagues remain under-commercialized, under-watched and under-trusted. Talent leaks abroad not only because of higher salaries but because the home market is structured against open contest. Fans who fill stadia and buy jerseys are treated as captive consumers rather than the ultimate beneficiaries of a competitive market. The beautiful game, the flying game of basketball, the physical poetry of rugby all are diminished when the rules of the market are written by those who benefit from their distortion.
Competition law is not the enemy of sport. It is the guardian of the contest that makes sport worth watching. Until the Authority, the federations, the clubs and the government treat the pitch as a market subject to the same disciplines that govern every other sector of the Kenyan economy, the law will remain a paper tiger while the real tigers those who control access, eligibility and commercial rights continue to feast. The statute is already written. The only missing ingredient is the will to enforce it.
The writer is a lawyer and social commentator
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