What the Mainland soccer title means to Yanga

Fans rallied in the streets of Dar es Salaam and across the country as they celebrated the title retention having defeated their archrivals Simba and Azam.

For fans, the football title is prestigious and affords them bragging rights and also merited the merry making in the streets and taunting of the defeated rivals. For domestic soccer fanaticism, this second season consecutive win gives Yanga a decisive and definitive status in front of the of park .

However, what does winning the Mainland soccer title it mean for the team? Is it the ultimate win? After the party, celebration and mocking of rivals, what is next?

Beyond the championship there is a lot of work to validate the title which can easily turn to a white elephant because for starters, Young Africans will now be required to represent Mainland Tanzania in the Confederation of African Football (CAF) Cup next year.

So now Yanga has to prepare itself to rub shoulders with counterparts from all over the continent, a daunting task by all measures. The Tanzanian team will be gauged against other teams from around the continent.

This is not the first time for Yanga and other Tanzanian teams to feature in the continental championships, however, none of them have made any significant impact in their participation except for Simba Sports Club which performed very well back in 1993.

In fact, leave alone winning the ultimate prize of the CAF championship, it has been too long ever since a Tanzanian team managed to cruise into the last eight group stage of the tournament despite the lucrative opportunities for mere participation.

The most recent time that a Tanzanian team reached that stage was back in 2003 and ever since then, no other team has managed the feat or even come close.

So there is great pressure for Yanga to break the cycle of failure and give the Tanzanian soccer fans a reason to celebrate by excelling through the CAF Champions League and reaffirming their supremacy beyond the Tanzanian borders.

Unlike in the past when clubs struggled to secure financial assistance, nowadays, top flight teams have an abundance of corporate world supporters that finance their needs. This is the time when clubs are supposed to make effective use of these sponsors.

Instead of simply making a regular appearance in the CAF Champions League, time has now come for Tanzanian teams to excel and prove their competence to the rest of the continent.

This time around, it is expected that Yanga will make its presence felt and to earn its place among the top clubs in the continent and to also command the respect of other clubs from around Africa.

So this is what it means to win the championship, it is not all celebrations and mockery but rather it is the beginning an even larger task to beat all other teams from across the continent and we hope for the sake of all Tanzanian soccer fans that this time around Yanga will carry the national flag to new highlights.