From left: Football Kenya Federation President Hussein Mohammed, vice president McDonald Mariga and Acakoro Football Academy and School Director Lukas Mott display a copy of the agreement with the federation signed with the academy on December 9, 2025 in Nairobi.
The year is 1990 in Paris, France. A police motorcyclist stops a man for speeding and upon notifying him of his offence, the man exclaims, “Don’t you know who I am? I am Thierry Henry’s father!”
Thierry Henry was 13 years old at the time, a fact that depicted his father’s arrogant response to the police motorcyclist as confidence in his son’s ability to make it as a professional footballer. At the time, Henry, who later won the Fifa World Cup and the Euro with France, had started his journey to becoming a professional footballer. He was one of 25 boys who had been enrolled at the esteemed Clairefontaine Academy in 1990. Clairefontaine, established in 1988, is a national football centre based in Paris that specialises in training French footballers from an early age.
This story is narrated in “Lonely at the Top”, French journalist Philippe Auclair’s biography of Arsenal’s all-time goal scorer and if recent developments in Kenyan football are anything to go by, a Kenyan father may soon attempt to evade punishment for a traffic offence by arrogantly boasting about his son’s football talent to a police officer.
On Tuesday last week, Football Kenya Federation (FKF) signed a two-year agreement with Acakoro Football Academy. Under the agreement, Acakoro will scout for the best Kenyan players born in 2011 starting this month. Acakoro Football Academy was founded in 2013 by Austrian Acakoro, an aid organisation which runs the academy through its Kenyan subsidiary.
FKF President Hussein Mohammed said formalizing the agreement “goes to heart of the FKF’s long-term vision of building proper structures for youth development in Kenya.”
Homa Bay County governor Gladys Wanga (second right) and Acakoro Academy General Manager Luka Mott (second left) display copies of memorandum of understanding on March 21, 2023 that will see a football academy being set up in the county.
He further noted that signing the partnership marked the start of a “structured and deliberate action by FKF” to bridge the gap between Kenya having world class football talents and lacking the structures to develop and nurture them.
The main aim of the partnership, Mohammed said, is “to create a cohesive Kenyan team capable of qualifying for the 2027 Fifa Under-17 Men’s World Cup which will be hosted by Qatar.”
“Players from the Acakoro Football Academy will be directly integrated into the national youth pathways,” Hussein added.
Kenya has never qualified for the Fifa U-17 men’s World Cup, a fact Hussein admitted with numerous statements that express his dissatisfaction with the country’s poor performance in men’s youth tournaments this year.
“Signing this partnership comes on the backdrop of difficult moments that we have had. We are not satisfied with our performance in youth competitions this year and we take responsibility for that,” he said. Acakoro will target 10-15 players in the first phase of recruitment but they will continue to scout more players to join the academy over the duration of the partnership.
“The top players identified will earn full scholarship to live, learn, and train at Acakoro’s 25-acre football academy in Homa Bay,” Mohammed had said.
Lukas Mott, an Austrian who is Acakoro’s Head of Sports, said the scouting will be done across five regions nationwide. The five regions, he said, will be determined later after they have mapped out the country for ease of planning and logistics. Mott described Acakoro’s facility in Homa Bay as a “residential high performance system” while Mohammed hyped it as “the first of its kind in the country and modeled on adapting best global practices to the Kenyan context”.
“Players will benefit from Competency Based Education-aligned learning and be exposed to elite coaching, analytics, and structured daily routines that will build their character,” Hussein said.
In his remarks, Mott had said Homa Bay was found to be ideal for setting up the academy’s location because the area’s “calm, quiet, and serene environment will shield players from distractions of the major cities”. Acakoro’s academy in Homa Bay has classrooms, dormitories, and one football pitch, Mott said. “We have plans of setting up more pitches,” he said.
In terms of being modeled on best practices, Acakoro’s academy can be compared to similar projects in Morocco and plenty in Europe, including France’s Clairefontaine. Like Acakoro, Clairefontaine is also a residential football academy. It had dormitories for players who apart from training at the facility; also attend school at nearby academic institutions.
“We have enough classrooms and dormitories,” Mott said when asked about the learning and accommodation facilities at Acakoro’s academy in Homa Bay.
Acakoro’s location in calm and serene Homa Bay perhaps matches that of Clairefontaine, a 56-acre facility nestled 50 south west of Paris in the Rambouillet forest. Thierry Henry’s father, as Auclair narrates in “Lonely at the Top”, used to sneak into that forest to spy on his training sessions before calling the academy later at night asking to speak to his son. Once Henry came to the phone, his father would bark tactical advice at him, explaining to him what he needed to correct.
It may be far-fetched but thanks to FKF’s partnership with Acakoro, it will not be surprising if efforts to realise Kenya’s 2027 Fifa U17 World Cup dream receives support from an over-zealous Kenyan father.
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