Is the Ethiopian Premier League Africa's most competitive league?

How the Ethiopian Premier League survived COVID and war... and how it is making a comeback

The Ethiopian Premier League is heating up. With only seven games remaining the Central Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) are three points clear of Defence Force and are on their way to a potential first ever league title in the club’s 42-year history, one season after the team earned promotion from the Ethiopian Higher league.

If CBE get it over the line, they will become the fifth different champion in the last six seasons (with no winner during the COVID season) making the Ethiopian Premier League one of the most competitive on the continent, all while the league recovers from the impact of both COVID and the Tigray War.

 In November 2020 when much of the world was re-entering lockdowns as the globe wrestled with dealing with the largest pandemic in history, Ethiopia was entering one of the deadliest conflicts in its own history. The Tigray War, fought in the north of the country on the border of Eritrea, would rage on for two years, claiming the lives of nearly 400,000 civilians.

A month after the war started, the Ethiopian Premier League restarted in Addis Ababa. Like many sports leagues around the world, the EPL opted to play the season in a bubble format with all the fixtures taking place in nation’s capital. Since the league restarted, none of the three clubs in the Tigray region have participated in the league, including Mekelle 70 Enderta who were the previous league champions when the league was initially halted. Unlike other competitions, the league has continued to play in a bubble because of the instability caused by the conflict.

For the last three years the Ethiopian Premier League has become a travelling act, moving from city to city, playing five rounds of fixtures before moving onto to a different city. The format has allowed the league to survive but it has come at a cost. Yesterday the Twins Derby took place between Fasil Kenema and Bahir Dar, two of the biggest clubs in the country. But a fixture that would have traditionally attracted tens of thousands was watched by only a couple of hundred in Hawassa, 500 km south of Bahir Dar and more than 600 km from Gondar, the home of Fasil Kenema.

But despite the challenges that the league has contended with over the last few years, the EPL is on its way up. In large part that is because of the 16 clubs in the Premier League, 14 of them are owned by various arms of the Ethiopian state. Some clubs are owned by local municipalities and districts while others like CBE are owned by state owned institutions. The state involvement means that the clubs aren’t at the whims of a wealthy owner or the income they generate commercially.

Clubs are allocated funds at the beginning of the season by the various arms of the government and then they spend those funds regardless of performance. It is also why earlier this year that the league claimed it is the third best paying league in all of Africa in terms of wages. Yes, players could never dream of making what they could at super clubs like Al Ahly, Mamelodi Sundowns or even Ethiopia’s local rivals like Simba and Yanga in Tanzania. But because every club in Ethiopia can pay a relatively good wage, the mean wage is higher than most other leagues on the continent.

In fact, such is the expenditure on player wages that the Premier League has this year implemented Financial Fair Play rules, becoming the first African nation to do so. A report drawn up last year found that clubs on average spend 70% of their allocated budgets on wages and almost nothing on infrastructure and youth development. In an attempt to deal with that the league has implemented a hard cap on what clubs can spend on wages. What this means is that all the clubs, from St George’s who have won 31 league titles down to clubs who are playing their first season in the topflight have the same limit on what they can spend on wages. The league has implemented these rules in order to make the clubs more sustainable and be able to slowly transition from being state-owned clubs, to being privately owned clubs. The unintended consequence is that the league is far more competitive than most other leagues around the world where success on the pitch is dictated by financial strength off of it.

One example of this benefit is that the three clubs from Tigray that stopped playing in the league are all making a comeback next season, something that would be unthinkable for comparable purely privately-owned clubs.

The second pillar of the league’s success has been the TV deal that it signed with Multichoice (DSTV/SuperSport) in 2020 just before the league restarted. Not only has that TV deal brought in $2.7 million per season for the league but it has brought the TV infrastructure and professionalism with it. Despite fans from clubs like Fasil Kenema and Bahir Dar not being able to watch their teams in the stadium, viewership of the Ethiopian Premier League is at its highest ever, at its best in terms of technical quality, and for the first time available to viewers outside the country.

For SuperSport and Multichoice it has been a no brainer. As Africa’s second largest country and fifth largest economy Ethiopia is a country that DSTV has invested in heavily in for the last couple decades already, and as a country so inwardly looking as Ethiopia, the potential of the EPL is huge.

Ethiopian football has a long way to go. The national team has disappointed since it qualified for the 2021 AFCON and few of the Ethiopian footballers abroad like Abubaker Nasser have thrived once they left the country and while the Tigray conflict has finished, the conflict in Tigray and Amhara regions continues.

But despite the seemingly insurmountable challenges, the Ethiopian Premier league has survived and has set itself up to thrive in the future.