About

TN Stars Football Club is an emerging soccer club from a local soccer academy initiative in Kasungu district in Malawi. This initiative was started by Thomas Nyirenda from whom the name TN is derived.

I was born in Kasungu five decades ago. I have great passion for soccer. I was privileged to have parents that allowed me to play soccer with my friends. Those days we had no proper balls but we used balls constructed out of plastic papers wrapped in polythene strings. I and fellow boys who grow up together in Kasungu played such balls in dusty ground and scorching sunshine every afternoon after school or the whole day over weekends.

A janitor at the town’s community centre hall kept some proper old balls whose access he strictly controlled. In any case one ball was not enough for scores of us wanting to have a kick. In early 90s I left Kasungu to study at a secondary school in northern Malawi where playing a normal ball was routine. That was good turn of events but my self-taught style of playing soccer could not take me beyond the ranks of the so called best players of those days.  So I worked on my education.

After my secondary school education I went to United Kingdom to study medicine. I played college soccer while studying and even went to get Class C Soccer Coaching Licence from the sessions organised by the Scottish Football Association. I have since lost the original certificate that signed and given by Paul Sturrock, a once famous Scottish footballer who trained us at the course.  My medical career has taken me to many places where I still enjoy a good career and playing soccer socially on weekends. While I was on one of my annual holidays to Kasungu in 2010 my heart was broken when a group of youths running around the grounds of my old school approached me and told me they wished they had started a soccer team but nobody in town had listened to their plea to provide a proper ball. I thought, “Things can’t be allowed to be the same in four decades!”

Out of my passion to give young boys a chance to kick a ball, enjoy life, build healthy bodies, keep out trouble and try their lack of chasing a dream of being a superstar was born this TN Stars FC Academy. This is my commitment: to play my part in giving the youth a chance at soccer. I would like to thank a lot of people who have given me their support to start realising this dream. The people include my family, village chief Kaning’a and his school committee at Kavunguti Primary School in Kasungu where the Academy football field is under construction, the coaches, the enthusiastic youth enrolled in the academy and their parents. Together we are in this long and winding road to Excellence!