Gor Mahia Football commonly also known as K’Ogalo (Luo for ‘”House of Ogalo”‘), is a football club based in Nairobi, Kenya. They have won the Kenyan Premier League a record 19 times and have also won the FKF President’s Cup a record 10 times. They are the only team from Kenya and the CECAFA region to win an African continental title to date, having won the African Cup Winners’ Cup in 1987 after previously reaching the final in 1979.
The club was formally established on 17 February 1968 as a merger of Luo Union and Luo Sports Club (also known as Luo Stars) and won the national league at the first time of asking. Some of its original leaders were politicians Tom Mboya and Jaramogi Oginga Odinga. However, the club was founded much earlier, in 1915, and participated intermittently in local tournaments in Western Kenya. Various groups used this name at different times.
The club plays its home games at the Nairobi City Stadium. Alternatively, they also play their home games at the Moi International Sports Centre and the Nyayo National Stadium. It has been proposed that the club hosts some of its home matches at its alternate stadiums in its earlier days, the renovated Kisumu County Stadium and the Mombasa Municipal Stadium.
The club won the Kenya National Football league in 1968, having been formally founded only in February of the same year.[5] In 1976, Gor Mahia won the national league unbeaten and repeated the same feat 39 years later under the leadership of Frank Nuttall
Towards the end of the 2000s, Gor started bouncing back to fame steadily bringing Kenyan football fans back to the pitch and regularly filling sold-out stadiums.[9] The club returned to silverware in 2008 when it won the KFF Cup after a thirteen-year drought of any major trophies. Gor proceeded to win the Kenya DSTV Super Cup against the year’s defending champs, Mathare United before the beginning of the 2009 KPL season.[10] On 26 October 2011 Gor Mahia in typically dominant fashion trounced Sofapaka to win the 2011 edition of the FKL Cup having dispatched their archrivals AFC Leopards 6 days earlier in a 20 October Heroes Day thriller.
Formation
Gor Mahia Football Club was formally established on 17 February 1968 after the merging of Luo Union and Luo Sports Club. The club was named after a legendary medicine man from Kanyamwa, Ndhiwa, Homa Bay in Luo mythology, whose nickname was Gor Mahia (“Mahia” is Luo for “magic”) because he was famous for performing magic.
The club’s most famous nickname, K’Ogalo, also stems from the medicine man, whose full name was Gor Wuod Ogada nyakwar Ogalo (Gor son of Ogada grandson of Ogalo), and as such was known as Gor Makogalo, or Gor K’Ogalo in short, which means “Gor of Ogalo’s homestead
Several prominent Luos from all walks of life met in Nairobi to christen the club. The name Gor Mahia was settled upon from a shortlist of other Luo cultural heroes and warriors such as: Nyathi Kwach; Lwanda Magere from Kano; Okore wuod Ogonda Mumbo from Kisumu; Ogutu wuod Kipapi from Ugenya; Kech Kamajwala from Asembo and Tao K’Ogot also from Ugenya.
Source: Wikipedia
