The Pope, Bono and... Mathare United FC

Whichever way you look, football in this country seems to be in pain.

As the Football Association continue to agonise over the push-and-shove finale in the Manchester United-Arsenal draw two weekends ago and Arsène Wenger sticks his ostrich-like neck further underground, chatrooms swap rumours about the identity of the Premiership players accused of raping a young woman in a posh London hotel.

Sven-Göran Eriksson, meanwhile, has to beg England supporters not to follow the team to Turkey this week in case some of their more excitable troops find themselves on the wrong end of a kebab stick. At Cambridge United, a steward is arrested for creating rather than controlling crowd violence.

And, yet again, there is a general air of despondency at the start of the season, once a time for foolish optimism.

The game has never been more prosperous or marketed more feverishly, but there is no escaping the malaise. The rich are paranoid, spending like lunatics, while the strugglers remain as desperate as ever. It's as if we don't know how to appreciate what we've got, the essence of a simple game.

We are mired in perennial speculation, for instance, about managers moving around their lucrative carousel, a September ritual as familiar as leaves falling from the trees. Football, in this country at least, has all the comforting allure of a psychiatrist's waiting room.

Yet elsewhere people in considerably more straitened circumstances than Roman Abramovich or Malcolm Glazer, the American millionaire making a serious move on Manchester United, are reminding us of the virtues of football, confirming it can still bring sunshine as well as cloudbursts of misery.

In quite the most uplifting football story since little Senegal beat France in the first match of the last World Cup, a team from the slums of Nairobi have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Mathare United Football Club and the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA) are among the 165 nominees alongside such disparate hopefuls as Bono and the Pope. The award is announced in Oslo on Friday. If they win, it will cap a remarkable story.

Mathare Valley spreads north from Kenya's capital, a running sore of poverty covered in corrugated iron, where street children use machetes and guns to survive in an environment of murder, rape, TB and cholera. Mathare - a shanty town housing 600,000 of the world's poorest people - and other Nairobi slums account for 80 per cent of Kenya's Aids victims, 700 of whom die every day.

Only two in 10 adults have legitimate employment. There is little formal education for the youth, and alcoholism, fuelled by the illicit stills that turn out fiery chang'aa, is rife.

But MYSA resolved 16 years ago to fight the tide of deprivation. It was then that a Canadian United Nations official, Bob Munro, saw local kids having a kickabout with a jwala, a polythene-bag-and-twine football. He offered to referee if they helped clean the area of litter, setting in motion an unstoppable process of mutual cooperation.

From this 'pay-it-back' approach sprung leagues for 14,000 children. In return for the facilities and organisation, the players keep their neighbourhood clean, plant trees and attend Aids, pregnancy and drug-awareness classes.

There are scholarships, too, for photography, music and drama. Teams get points for their work as well as their football.

My colleague Tom Templeton has been there. He reports: 'It's an awesome sight as, on pitches of hard, red mud dotted around the slum borrowed from the police and churches [MYSA own only one], hundreds of kids watch intense 11-a-side matches of barefoot kids, awaiting their turn.'

Munro stresses that this is not 'a white man in Africa story'. He points out that the 63 staff who run the scheme are all former or current slum-dwellers who played in the leagues.

'So far,' says Peter Serry, the director of MYSA, 'the scheme has made life more bearable and broken down many of the tribal, territorial and prejudicial barriers of life in Kenya.'

MYSA's youth teams have won several international tournaments, and this season the under-16s beat Ajax Amsterdam twice in Norway. 'They were tougher than us, and stronger,' says the captain Nelson Ngari, 'but we were more determined.'

And the senior team spawned from the slum development, Mathare United, have won Kenya's version of the FA Cup, and finished in the top four of the Premier Division for the past four years. Four Mathare players are in the Kenya team who qualified for the 2004 Africa Nations Cup. Titus Mulama, the softly spoken captain of Mathare, was Kenya's player of the year in 2003.

This success, of course, has not gone unnoticed. Alex Ferguson and Bobby Robson have been alerted to the potential of the Mathare hotbed and Mulama says: 'My dream would be to move to Europe and to play for Manchester United.' Inevitably, given Kenya's propensity for graft, there has been profiteering.

United were one of the clubs willing to trial Mathare's young star striker, Dennis Olieh, in 2000. Instead, along with Mulama, he was sent to the Egyptian club Ismailia in a deal brokered by the Kenyan Football Federation's general secretary Allan Chenane, leaving Mathare with no fee.

In Mali, football is also used to stress the importance of wearing condoms. At a recent women's tournament in the capital, Bamako, the Super Lionnes played AS Mande and, in the background, role plays boomed out over the PA system in both French (the language of education) and Bambara (the most widely spoken tongue). They were stories of everyday events, designed to raise awareness of Aids.

'She saved your life. Wallahi!' says one character. 'Everything you do with a condom is good! Aha!' Players and fans were also shown how to use condoms - using bananas. It was a daring strategy in a Muslim country.

Allison Meserve, the youth reproductive co-ordinator for Population Services International (PSI Mali), told the journalist James Copnall that women's football is targeted because women are sexually active from a younger age, yet often don't have the confidence to buy or even discuss condoms. 'Sport is a great way to reach women and young girls who are confident in themselves because of the sports they do,' she says.

It seems to be working. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.7 per cent of the Malian population was infected in 2001, a rate considerably lower than the majority of African countries.

Hawa Kone, a Bamako teenager, said: 'I now understand everything a lot better. And it has made me keen to spread the message. It's amazing how many girls don't know how to use a condom before we talk to them.'

These are small victories that chip away at a monumental problem, successes that put any European win or setback by Chelsea or United in perspective.

On Friday, you would hope the people of Mathare rise to celebrate an even bigger victory than any they have managed on the football field and that the rest of Africa will be inspired by them to use football for something more worthwhile than ramping up a transfer deal.

'We'd love to win,' says Peter Serry. 'There are so many innovations that kids have come up with that we can't fund.'

And you'd like to think they have a better chance than at least three of the other Nobel nominees: Jacques Chirac, George W Bush and Tony Blair.