As the 2026-27 Uganda Premier League season kicks off, Ugandan football is once again celebrating a cash injection while quietly ignoring the officials without whom no match can legally start.
The National Council of Sports has allocated Shs5.5 billion to the country’s 18 Premier League clubs for the season, roughly Shs305.56 million per club. Under the reported framework, 60 per cent goes to player and technical team welfare, 20 per cent to national team players, 10 per cent to talent identification, and 10 per cent to administration. Players and coaches, in other words, sit at the center of the plan.
Referees do not appear in it at all.
That omission is not a footnote. Under the Laws of the Game, football rests on three pillars: players, coaches and referees. Remove the players, and there is no game. Remove the coaches, and there is no preparation. Remove the referees, and there is no properly governed match. Yet only two of the three pillars are being budgeted for.
A Match Fee that insults the job
While clubs argue over an allocation worth hundreds of millions, referees at the base of the pyramid are reportedly still being paid as little as an estimated 100,000 shillings per match, a figure football analysts have cited on air while discussing why officiating standards keep slipping. That is the fee for a professional who has passed fitness tests, sat theory exams, travelled upcountry most times at their own expense, and then stood in the middle of a stadium absorbing abuse from players, coaches and fans for ninety minutes.
Reports over the past two seasons have also described referees going unpaid for months at a time, surviving on transport refunds while match fees pile up in arrears.
Contrast that with players and coaches. Their disputes over unpaid salaries are real and well documented, and FUFA’s club licensing rules and the n Professional Footballers status committee exist precisely because regulation alone has not solved the problem. But at least there is a growing architecture built to fight for them: legal support, insurance, career transition planning, financial assistance. Referees have no equivalent muscle behind them.
The Union supposed to fight for Referees (UFRA)
This is where the story turns from neglect to something referees themselves are increasingly unwilling to stay quiet about. Multiple officials have privately raised concerns that deductions taken from their earnings and dues, money that should exist to protect their welfare, are instead absorbed into the Uganda Football Referees Association’s own running costs, chiefly its Annual General Meetings. Those AGMs, function less as accountability forums and more as political theatre, occasions for entrenching leadership positions and disbursing allowances to office holders, while the rank-and-file official who blew the whistle in the rain in Kabale sees none of it back.
To be clear, these are allegations, not a proven account of UFRA’s books, and the association deserves the chance to answer them with a transparent financial statement. But the fact that such allegations exist at all, and that they persist year after year without a public rebuttal or an open audit, is itself the story. Ugandan football cannot demand transparency from clubs while a referees’ body that collects money from its own members offers none in return.
If referees feel unrepresented by the very organisation that exists to represent them, that grievance should not be buried under committee protocol. It should be forced into the open, through transparent, democratic, audited structures that any member can inspect.
Niccolò Machiavelli’s central insight about institutions is blunt: a state, or any organised body, that depends on the goodwill of one ruler or one clique is inherently fragile, while one built on durable, accountable institutions can survive the individuals who pass through it. Applied to Ugandan refereeing, the lesson is uncomfortable. A union whose main visible activity is protecting the standing of its own leadership, rather than the livelihood of its members, is not an institution in Machiavelli’s sense. It is a court, and courts exist to serve whoever sits at the top of them.
Machiavelli also argued that people act according to the incentives placed in front of them, not according to appeals to their better nature. Ugandan football wants referees who are incorruptible, punctual, fit and fair under pressure. But it is asking for professional conduct while paying amateur money and, allegedly, watching a chunk of what little money exists disappear into internal politics. You cannot demand integrity from an official whose institution has not modelled it for him.
Beyond the 5.5 billion
None of this means the NCS allocation is worthless. It is a serious intervention, and the requirement that recipient clubs maintain budgets, operational plans and accountability mechanisms is exactly the standard referees’ welfare should be held to as well. But a football economy that funds two of its three pillars and leaves the third to survive on 100,000 shillings a match and an opaque union is not building a sustainable game. It is building resentment that will eventually show up as bribery, bias, or officials simply walking away from the profession.
A properly regulated football stakeholders’ SACCO, covering players, coaches and referees alike, with mandatory savings, transparent governance, emergency access for injury or job loss, affordable credit and long-term payouts, is one credible route out of this. The details of contribution rates, withdrawal age and investment vehicles would need proper legal, financial and actuarial input. But the principle holds regardless of pillar: football should not only provide a living; it should help build a life after football.
The question for FUFA, the NCS, the UPL and UFRA itself is no longer whether refereeing deserves attention. It is whether the people currently controlling referees’ money are prepared to open their books and prove the allegations wrong, or whether Ugandan football will keep pretending the third pillar does not exist until it finally gives way.
