I randomly came across this football club on X a while ago and ended up going down a bit of a rabbit hole. https://preview.redd.it/c8qmiboa0bnh1.jpg?width=1540&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=17c5ad782e098dddaaeec9974f46d18e07625cc7 The club is called Chizumulu United, and they’re based on Chizumulu Island in Lake Malawi. It’s a pretty remote island, and most of the players are locals. What made this interesting to me is the story behind the club. The guy who owns the club is a Korean university student. He first ran into the team while he was traveling around Malawi, and they kept in touch after that. At one point they couldn’t even enter the league because they didn’t have the roughly $300 needed for the entry fee. He initially offered to just pay the fee, but eventually realized that paying it once wouldn’t really solve anything. So he ended up becoming the owner of the club and later brought in sponsors from Korea. Before that, things were pretty rough. Players basically weren’t getting paid, they sometimes had to catch fish together to raise money for away games, and they didn’t even have their own kits. Away trips could apparently involve dozens of people packed into a small truck. https://preview.redd.it/aveb18wv1bnh1.jpg?width=1668&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=70e78432d8f25d4292f48061a77b4cd49c6539db Things have changed quite a bit since then. They have match bonuses, proper kits, football boots through Puma, ankle supports, some help with injury treatment, and they sometimes hire buses for away games. They also sell jerseys to help fund the club. And now… he actually lives there. He took a year off from university this year and is spending the whole year in Malawi. But the part I found most interesting is that the owner doesn’t really try to run the football side himself. The head coach, Mcfallen, has basically full control over football decisions, including recruitment. The owner and coaches obviously discuss things together, but he doesn’t personally decide which players to sign. There’s actually a funny example of this in the video. The owner goes all the way to Blantyre to look for potential players, but instead of deciding who to sign himself, he mostly just films the players training and sends the footage back to the coach. https://preview.redd.it/1h15i4ee0bnh1.jpg?width=3062&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=22ce878be124425cc49af5658d0d7d2c7c8c7320 So the owner goes scouting and his main job is basically… filming players for the coach lol. There was also a pretty memorable story involving one of the original players, Gundo. During a match, he broke most of one of his front teeth. The team was staying in Mzuzu at the time, and apparently the local options for treating it weren’t great. https://preview.redd.it/677yj5dg0bnh1.jpg?width=3052&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fdc771fe8147ffae42ca7ef9e1e0700bd72c2252 So the owner, Gundo and the club’s media officer Moster ended up driving around six hours from Mzuzu to Lilongwe to get him treated at a dental clinic run by Korean missionaries. They found out that the tooth was fractured all the way down to the root and he needed an extraction, implant and bone graft. The treatment apparently went well, and he got a temporary tooth afterward. https://preview.redd.it/wihpgyxh0bnh1.jpg?width=3058&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08c111940941206dcbb15c5a6bbe8f0c55c942ec What’s kind of crazy is that Gundo and Moster had never even been to Lilongwe before. They’re from this very remote island, so going to the capital was a pretty unusual experience for them. The owner also took the coaching staff to Korea for about three weeks during the winter. They visited K League facilities, watched training sessions and matches, and got to see how things work there. He covered the costs himself. There’s a K League 1 club, FC Anyang, that has a partnership with Chizumulu United as well. https://preview.redd.it/1wsbbe111bnh1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=e688f2f17a25b18cb1db7407fe8bd21e17ac957f And the club seems pretty connected to the island itself. Home games bring in hundreds of people and feel more like a village event than just a football match. The club also donates footballs and school supplies to the local elementary school. Most of the players are islanders, and apparently the long-term goal is to eventually get some of them into the Malawi Super League, or even overseas. The coaches seem to really want the players to have opportunities beyond just playing football on the island. They’re currently in the Northern Region League, which is the third tier. Only one team gets promoted, so it’s not exactly an easy road. The video ends with a pretty good payoff too. They play Jenda United, who were unbeaten at the time, and Chizumulu win 4-0. They briefly went top of the table after the win. I just thought it was a pretty cool look at what running a tiny football club as one person is actually like. There aren’t really any big name signings or anything like that, and the owner doesn’t seem too interested in being the face of the club. He mostly seems to be there to help the team actually function.Curious what you guys think about this way of running a club.Original Video Soruce: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgN1k8jBYbU   submitted by   /u/hjun1052 [link]   [comments]