Chizumulu About Chizumulu United
Chizumulu United plays out of Chizumulu Island, one of two inhabited islands in Lake Malawi, alongside neighboring Likoma Island. There's no bridge and no regular flight to the mainland — getting there means a boat, sometimes a small wooden one, sometimes the MV Ilala, the ferry that also serves Mozambique further down the lake. Fewer than 5,000 people live on the island. The club competes in the Northern Region Football Association's League One, the third tier of Malawian football, and its home ground is a dirt pitch on Chizumulu itself, ringed with tarp so people without a match ticket can't watch from outside.
A club that almost didn't make it
Ahead of the 2025 season, Chizumulu United couldn't cover its league registration fee and was set to miss the year entirely. A Korean YouTuber who had spent part of the previous season traveling with the squad and filming their away trips — known online as Changbakgol — covered the fee, a few hundred thousand won. Then he decided a one-off payment wouldn't fix anything for the long term, and took on full ownership of the club instead: its administration, its sponsorships, its travel budget. Everything on the football side — selection, tactics, training — stays with head coach Mcfallen Mafuta and his coaching staff. By his own account, most of what the chairman knew about running a football club going in came from years of playing Football Manager.
Since taking over, the club has launched its first official jersey, designed around the shape of Chizumulu Island and the fishing nets used by island residents, with a goalkeeper kit that uses pink for sunset and light blue for dawn. The crest carries a Chichewa phrase that translates to "fight until the end and win." A partnership with K League club FC Anyang brought player-coach Han Ga-ram to the island for a week of hands-on coaching, and in mid-2026 the three-man coaching staff — Mcfallen, assistant coach Mackson Thundu, and team doctor Robert Mzizimanga — spent nearly a month training alongside FC Anyang's first team and academy squads in Korea, their first time on a plane. They came home to open the 2026/27 season with a 3-1 win.
What you'll find on this site
Match highlights, away-day vlogs, and interviews are filmed and narrated by the chairman himself, in Korean, on the Changbakgol YouTube channel. None of it comes with English captions. Chizumulu TV is a companion site that adds English (and other language) subtitles, timed to the original footage, so the club is watchable for people who don't speak Korean or Chichewa — everyone from casual football fans who stumble onto a highlight reel to anyone curious about lower-league football in a part of the world that almost never gets covered in English.
Videos are organized into Highlights (match footage) andOriginal (vlogs, interviews, behind-the-scenes) — browse both in theArchive. Each video page has a synced subtitle panel you can click through to jump around, a cast list of who appears in that video, and related videos featuring the same people. For the fuller story of the club's founding and the takeover, see the club history page on the main Chizumulu site.
Follow the club
Match footage and vlogs go up first on theChangbakgol YouTube channel, with English subtitles following here shortly after. The club also posts updates on itsFacebook page.
One important disclaimer
This is an independent, unofficial companion site. The English (and other language) subtitles here are fan translations, not official captions reviewed or approved by the channel. All video content remains hosted on YouTube and belongs to its creator; this site only embeds the official YouTube player and links back to the source.