The Empty Column: Why East African Women's Sport Gets Erased From the Record

In March 2026, in Nairobi, I opened a spreadsheet on a laptop with a worn hinge. The file held all 132 matches of Kenya's 2026-2026 women's premier league season, sorted across 41 data columns: minutes played, passes, pass completion, average line height, sprint counts, ball recoveries. I ran a count of empty cells. Nine of the 41 columns contained not a single character for the entire season. The possession column was empty. The high-press column was empty. The assists column was filled for only 27 matches, and in 19 of those the recorder wrote down the wrong player name.

A whole season had taken place. There were goals. There were diving saves. There were counter-attacks rehearsed on training pitches until the whole squad knew them by heart. When the season closed, almost nothing remained that anyone could look up.

East Africa does not lack women's football talent; it lacks people who write things down.

That empty column was not a technical glitch. It was the output of a system that had quietly decided which things were worth recording and which could be left to drift.

The men's league has a data provider. The women's league has people with pens

To understand why the column is empty, you have to look at the structure behind it. The Kenyan men's premier league has a paid data provider, a season-by-season contract, fixed cameras in the stands, on-site data entry staff, and a portal any reporter can open before filing a match report. Same country, same governing federation. The women's league runs on something else entirely: a handful of volunteers, a few notebooks, a few phones, and a paper scoresheet folded in half.

When a division has nobody paid to record it, that division vanishes from every analysis within a single season.

I once asked a coach in Vihiga why she did not send her match data to the organisers. She laughed and said she had sent it three times, nobody replied, and by the fourth time she stopped. That coach knew exactly how many kilometres each of her players covered per match, but that knowledge existed only in her head and on a few handwritten pages. No researcher in Hanoi, London or Lagos could ever look it up.

That is the first mechanism of invisibility: the data exists, but it does not exist anywhere public.

The first channel, and the price of holding the microphone

I entered journalism in 2026 at Runner's World, where I learned a discipline that is simple to the point of cruelty: if you cannot measure it, do not write that it happened. I wrote thousands of running stories in that period, and I noticed something about the track. In athletics, African women were measured with the same stopwatch as men. That is why athletics has a far more complete record of East African women than football does. A 1,500m runner in Iten appears in international databases the moment she crosses the line. A full-back in Kisumu does not.

In 2026, when I was thirty-two, I founded the podcast Soka La Wanawake in Nairobi. The premise was simple: prove that African women's football has tactical depth nobody has mined. To prove it, I had to build my own tools, because I could not sit around waiting for someone to sell me something they had already decided was not worth producing.

The first channel is always the hardest, but somebody has to hold the microphone.

I followed the entire 2026-2026 Kenyan women's season, travelling to pitches in Vihiga, Kisumu and Nairobi, logging every phase of play with a personal camera and a notebook. By the end of the season I had a dataset I had built myself. In it, Vihiga Queens scored 23 goals from high pressing. Over roughly the same period, Kenya's men's national team scored just 14 goals of the same type in competitive internationals, according to data I collected and cross-checked against match footage.

Twenty-three and fourteen

I took that dataset on air and said plainly that the pressing model of the Kenyan women's league was running more smoothly than that of the men's team in the same division. The next day, two male sports journalists called it a joke. One added that those presses were simply the result of women's teams losing the ball more often.

I did not dodge. I invited them to the studio, replayed three Vihiga Queens matches, and laid out twelve successful pressing sequences with ball-recovery timestamps and the position of every line. After that session, both went quiet. Neither called again. But the more important thing I took away was not winning a personal argument: the industry's first reflex on seeing data about women's football is to explain it backwards.

Prejudice is not a lack of data. Prejudice is what makes people refuse to read the data already sitting in front of them.

From then on I set a professional rule: every article must contain at least three statistical indicators and one pressing diagram. Not to look more professional than my male colleagues, but because I knew that if an article about women's football is not anchored in numbers, it gets downgraded into sentiment, and sentiment does not generate tactical argument.

World Cup 2026 and the 94 percent silence

In 2026, on the strength of the podcast's reputation, I was accredited for the World Cup in Russia. I set myself a quiet task: sit through all 64 matches and log what European broadcasters actually talked about in their studio segments. I recorded duration and sorted content into two buckets: tactical analysis, and star narratives or highlight goals.

After 64 matches: six percent of airtime went to tactics. The remaining 94 percent went to male stars, beautiful goals, and pre-packaged personal stories.

At the same time, the Women's Africa Cup of Nations was being played, and not a single international broadcaster carried it live. No passing maps. No post-match stat sheets. Just the final score, republished in a few lines at the bottom of a sports section.

World Cup 2026 showed me this: Nigerians were being looked at, not watched.

I have spent a lot of time on the difference between those two verbs. To be looked at is when an audience cares about a body, an expression, a kit, the way a woman athlete collapses after a defeat. To be watched is when an audience cares about structure, about how a midfield rotates, about whether a back line steps up or drops off in the 70th minute.

Inside that 94 percent, African women appeared as images. Inside the remaining six percent, almost nobody called them by name either.

A twelve-part series and 2.1 million impressions

Back from Russia, I wrote a twelve-part series directly comparing possession data, pass counts and foul frequency between WAFCON women's teams and World Cup men's teams. The series reached 2.1 million impressions. That was the biggest figure I had posted to that point, and what struck me was that it did not come from a shock event. It came from a dry comparison table.

The consequence arrived faster than I expected: the Football Kenya Federation invited me to serve as a communications adviser to improve the image of women's football ahead of WAFCON 2026. I accepted, with one condition laid on the table from the start: every national women's team press conference had to include at least one tactical question, prepared by me in advance and handed to young reporters. That condition sounds small. It is not. It changes how a press room operates, because a tactical question forces a coach to answer with tactics instead of with belief.

The invisible tacticians

In March 2026, the entire international calendar was suspended indefinitely. The women's World Cup was pushed back. Pitches closed. I could have sat and waited, the way much of the sports media industry did. Instead I did something I recommend to anyone in this trade: I went looking for amateur footage.

I contacted twelve women's clubs across Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda and asked them to send me anything they had shot on phones during lockdown: training sessions, internal friendlies, at-home conditioning work. In total I gathered more than forty hours of low-quality vertical video, with wind noise and children running around the pitch.

When the competitions stopped, I saw the invisible tacticians start to speak.

In that material, one detail stopped me cold: nine of the eleven women's goalkeepers I was tracking had written their own tactical notebooks during lockdown. They drew set-piece angles, listed the shooting tendencies of opposing forwards, logged the movement habits of every team in their division. I had never seen that behaviour at the same frequency among male goalkeepers in my own research.

One goalkeeper in western Kenya sent me a hardcover notebook she had bound herself with cardboard, eighteen handwritten pages inside, one team per page. On the page for the strongest team in the league she had written in red pen: "Shoots across goal more than 70 percent of the time when leading, shoots straight when trailing." She had no computer, no software, no data analyst. She had a notebook and a memory honed over several seasons.

I compiled it into a forty-page report titled The Invisible Tacticians, arguing that resource scarcity had forced East African women players to invent their own defensive systems, in a way that men's football in the same region was never compelled to do.

A British university added the report to its syllabus. For me its value sat elsewhere: it proved that when nobody records things for you, people record them for themselves. And when they do it themselves, what they produce is often sharper than what is handed down from above.

An empty column reads like a verdict

This is the point I want to push to the end, because it is where most analysis of women's sport stops too early.

When an analyst opens a file and sees empty cells, the correct professional reflex is to write "insufficient information" and stop. Technically, that is a sound decision. Nobody should invent an athlete, a record or an indicator. I believe in that discipline enough to have made it a working principle across twenty-five years.

But there is a place where that discipline becomes a trap.

When an empty column is left empty long enough, it stops being a gap in information and starts being read as a statement: there was nothing here worth recording.

That shift happens silently in every part of the chain. A sponsor opens the file, sees blanks, concludes there is no basis for valuation. A broadcaster opens the file, sees blanks, concludes there is no content to mine. A fan opens the file, sees blanks, concludes the division must not be worth watching. None of them says the words "women's football is inferior." They simply find nothing to say, and that silence automatically becomes the verdict.

Athletics is fundamentally different. On the track, the stopwatch does not distinguish by gender. A woman who runs 800m in 1:55 appears automatically in every ranking table, and nobody can argue she does not exist. East African women's football has no such stopwatch. It has cardboard-bound notebooks in goalkeepers' backpacks.

The transfer map and the mis-placed column

There is a striking paradox here: the only thing about African women's football that is fully documented and widely circulated is the transfer fee.

In April 2026, Barbra Banda moved from Shanghai to Orlando Pride for a fee reported at around 740,000 US dollars in the club's own announcement. It was one of the highest fees ever paid for an African woman player, and it was covered everywhere, from Nairobi to Lagos to London. Stories about her came fully loaded: goals, minutes, chance conversion rates.

On the transfer map, women are numbers placed in the wrong column.

I mean that very literally. An East African woman player is acknowledged once she has a price. She is not acknowledged during the six or eight years before that, when she was playing in a league with no data provider, in front of stands with no fixed cameras, under the eyes of coaches with no software. When she is sold, people suddenly produce a complete profile of her. But that profile is not built from the years she was developing. It is built from the years she became a commodity.

At Paris 2026, Banda scored four goals for Zambia, including a hat-trick in a 6-5 defeat to Australia, one of the highest-scoring matches in Olympic women's football history. Those goals were recorded, counted, analysed, replayed in slow motion from multiple angles.

That same week, I received a message from a coach in Kisumu asking whether I could help her obtain her goalkeeper's save percentage for the past season. She needed it to build a sponsorship application for her club. I had to tell her I did not have it, and that in all likelihood nobody did.

A goal in Paris is recorded forever. A season in Kisumu is not. The gap does not lie in the quality of the play.

A pioneer is not simply the best player

When I write about pioneers, I am often asked whether I am romanticising endurance. I think that question is fair, and I try to answer it with structure rather than emotion.

The pioneers of East African women's football are not the top scorers. They are the ones who stay after training to hand-copy the opposition roster, who buy their own ankle tape for the whole squad, who call me at eleven at night to say tomorrow's match may not be played because the pitch is flooded. They perform the logistics work of a professional sports organisation, unpaid, and they appear in no file anywhere.

Inside my forty-page report there is a small appendix I consider its most important part: a list of eleven East African women goalkeepers with a short description of each notebook. I deliberately wrote out their full names, clubs and positions, because the whole purpose of that appendix was to move those names into a file that can be searched.

One of them told me something I recorded verbatim in the report: "Nobody ever asked me about this notebook before. You all only ask how many saves I made."

The difference between those two questions is the entire problem. The first opens a method. The second closes an indicator.

Data discipline, and the limits of neutrality

I need to be explicit here, because this is the boundary I draw for myself and for anyone writing alongside me.

When source material is empty, the ethically correct response is to state that the source material is empty. You do not get to invent an athlete, a performance or a record in the name of a good cause. You do not take a familiar archetype and drop it into the blank so the story looks complete.

But there is a subtler temptation running the other way: the temptation to stop at the phrase "insufficient information" and consider the job done. The writer feels honest, having fabricated nothing, having kept the discipline. In practice, that writer has just added one more line to the very file that is getting this division valued at zero.

Data honesty must not become a pretext for stopping the record. The right answer to an empty column is to go and find data, not to declare that data does not exist.

Three years after World Cup 2026, I was still writing pieces like that. In one article on East African women's football I had to leave the comparison section between two goalkeepers blank because no source provided save data. I left it blank and stated why. Immediately afterwards, I called three coaches and asked what they remembered. I gathered enough to write a passage about those two goalkeepers' habits of coming off their line, sourced to direct interviews rather than statistical records.

That is how I handle a gap: I do not fill it with fake numbers. I fill it with a different method.

From the stand to the microphone

I have watched Kenyan women's football from the stands for years, and what I learned on those afternoons was never about the scoreline. It was that I had to record almost everything myself, because I knew that when the match ended and the floodlights went off, whatever I wrote down would be the only source left for whoever came next.

One match in Vihiga stays with me, not for the result but for a small detail: the home side changed its defensive shape in the 60th minute, pushing the midfield line about five metres higher, and over the following twelve minutes recovered the ball seven times in the opposition half. No stat sheet recorded it. No other reporter was in the stand that day. If I had not written it, it would have disappeared.

That is what this job means in this region. It is not about analysing a match that has been fully documented. It is about becoming the person who documents a match that, without you, nobody would know had ever happened.

What is changing

Not everything is frozen. In the past two years a few East African women's leagues have begun to attract data sponsors, mostly in the form of live-scoring apps funded by telecoms companies. A handful of regional universities have added women's sports data analytics to their curricula. And at continental level, some recent WAFCON matches have been streamed on digital platforms, which means footage now exists for later analysis.

But here is what I want to say clearly to anyone tracking this process: data does not generate itself because the stage gets bigger. Data appears when somebody decides to record it, and that decision is always a decision about value.

The invisible tacticians are still out there. There are still women goalkeepers in western Kenya writing notebooks by hand, still coaches holding an entire season's worth of information in their heads with nowhere to store it. They do not need someone to arrive and announce that they deserve attention.

I am not looking for a level playing field. I draw my own lines.

The old laptop in Nairobi still holds that spreadsheet with its nine empty columns. I have not deleted it, and I have not filled it with data I do not have. I keep it as a document. Whenever someone asks why it is so hard to write about a women's football match in Kisumu, I open the file and let them count the blanks themselves.

Then I ask them one question: that season, which team pressed best? Nobody can answer, because nobody wrote it down. And in that silence, I find the reason to sit in the stand again the following afternoon.