Listen to This Article Enhance your reading experience by listening to this article.

Local football lovers have a reason to smile after the visiting delegation from world football governing body Fifa and Confederation of African Football (CAF) announced plans to put up a Technical Centre in the country.

Once completed, the technical centre would be crucial in the high quality training of coaches, referees and youth players.

According to a senior Football Kenya federation (FKF) official who was part of the team that had a lengthy meeting with the visiting officials, but sought anonymity, the proposal is a sealed deal and it’s a start of a total revamp of Kenyan football.

“The visiting delegation toured our secretariat to see if everything was moving on smoothly after we resumed out operations following a lengthy ban and they will issue a report soon. On the issue of the technical centre, we gave a proposal and they approved it. It is good news for Kenyan football and will certainly help the growth of the sport in all perspectives,” the source said.

Fifa Director of Member Associations Africa Gelson Fernandez: “This is a very important mission becaue we want to ensure that Kenya is back on track and that football is played without any friction in the country. This is a country with great potential with people who love sports and football in particular, you can count on me to make this a reality so that every kid in this team has a platform to be able to play anywhere in the world.”

He added: “We were just assessing the situation at FKF as they are just coming from a lengthy suspension and we are not having any conclusions now. We were able to meet officials of the professional football, women football, youth football, finance and technical officials in the last two days.”

Fernandez said Fifa’s main aim was for football to be run in a proper and transparent way under the statutes of Fifa.

“We have targets and I hope we will achieve them with the federation, the government and CAF. We have to all work together to make sure that Kenyan football is back to where it is,” he said.