TAKEAWAYS

• Wakiso Giants owner Musa Atagenda says the club spent between Shs700 million and over Shs1 billion per season, with huge costs going into training, player welfare, staff salaries, matchday logistics and daily operations.
• The club’s revenue, especially gate collections, remained too low to sustain operations, with some matches against teams like UPDF, Maroons and KCCA bringing in less than Shs500,000.
• Atagenda says the financial mismatch forced the painful decision to dissolve Wakiso Giants, despite a few high-earning fixtures such as SC Villa and KCCA generating better gate collections.

Wakiso Giants Football Club proprietor Musa Atagenda has opened up on the financial strain that pushed the club to the brink, revealing the enormous costs he has carried since the club’s inception up to its eventual dissolution announced earlier this year.

Speaking candidly about the realities of running a Uganda Premier League side, Atagenda said Wakiso Giants was spending between Shs700 million and over Shs1 billion per season, yet the returns from gate collections and matchday revenue remained painfully low.

According to him, even an ordinary training day came with significant costs. The club would spend more than Shs530,000 on items such as training balls, bibs, water and players’ allowances, in addition to facilitation for the coaching staff.

“On a normal training day, we would spend over Shs530,000 before even talking about salaries, office expenses, transport and the other daily running costs,” Atagenda said.

Beyond training, the club also had to cater for players’ salaries, coaching staff wages, office staff payments, fuel, electricity, water and other operational expenses. On a home matchday alone, Atagenda said the club would spend about Shs3 million on preparations such as pitch marking, slashing and general logistics. He added that away matches often cost even more.

Atagenda noted that the club’s earnings rarely matched the expenditure. He said some fixtures against teams like UPDF, Maroons and KCCA brought in less than Shs500,000 in gate collections, making sustainability almost impossible.

“The only games that gave us meaningful gate collections were against SC Villa, where we made about Shs11 million, and KCCA, where we got around Shs7 million. But for many other matches, we were making as little as Shs1.5 million,” he explained.

With expenses consistently outweighing income, Atagenda said the numbers simply stopped making sense, leaving the club with no option but to close. For him, dissolving Wakiso Giants was painful, but ultimately unavoidable.