Nigeria has always had a peculiar football structure in that all clubs are controlled by government departments and have operated without a grassroots involvement. When ECN ruled the local scene, the members of the team were employees of that corporation and only played football on the side so that the fortunes of the club were tied down with those of ECN, just as was the case with the Railways, Ports Authority, PWD (Public Works Department), Police, and lesser clubs which were sponsored by and affiliated with government institutions. From time to time however, private companies or individuals stepped in to float football clubs and these were viable as long as their proprietors retained an interest in those clubs. Perhaps the most famous of these clubs were Leventis originally based in Lagos but later shifted base to Moniya, a suburb of Ibadan, Stationery Stores which took Lagos by storm in the middle sixties and became the darling club of the fickle Lagos fans who transferred their allegiance, such as it was, en masse from ECN to the new boys on the block. Stationery Stores was a team which played a scintillating brand of soccer which betrayed the professional status of their players. The team was coached by ‘Eto’ Amechina who insisted on a brand of soccer which until then was associated with the Brazilians before their football was bastardised by the introduction of the pragmatism of European football. Unfortunately for Nigerian football, the proprietor of the club, Adebajo was not blessed with long life and departed the scene long before his football philosophy took hold in Nigeria. There were a few teams in this category but the one most worthy of mention was Amukpe FC, a team based in the village of Amukpe near the town of Warri. This team, sponsored by a Syrian came out of nowhere to win the Western Region Challenge cup in 1962 and came down to Lagos to take part in the finals of that year’s Challenge cup. I had the privilege of seeing the team arrive for their semi-final match against the Police.  In keeping with simplicity of those days, they arrived in Lagos on the morning of that match in three Peugeot station wagons having travelled overnight from Amukpe but this did not stop them from giving the much vaunted Police team a big fright losing the match by a paltry one goal margin. Several of those giant killers notably Jerry Azinge and Sammy Opone were snapped up by Lagos clubs and became the household names they could only have dreamt about had they remained in the backwoods of Amukpe.

In those days, the Challenge cup competition was a massive affair which captured the imagination of football fans all over the nation. The competition was played on regional basis with the regional champions coming to Lagos for the final shootout at the iconic KGV stadium. Every schoolboy in Nigeria followed the competition avidly none more avid than I. The teams were representatives of towns and in those days, Port Harcourt with their compliment of Onyes (Onyeali, Onyeado, Onyewuna, the master dribbler), Kano, Ibadan and various Lagos teams were prominent. Also prominent were successive teams from Jos which had the unalloyed support of all uncommitted football fans from all over the nation,  not only for their beautiful football but for their heroic failures as until now, no team from that town high up on the Jos Plateau has ever had the privilege of taking home that coveted trophy. With the current debased status of that competition, winning it now would be a serious anticlimax and a mockery of those past failures.

Read Also: Football induced memories

For all its popularity, football has hardly ever penetrated the consciousness of Nigerians in the same way that it has done in other parts of the world and indeed some other African counties. This is why only two Nigerian clubs, Rangers FC and 3SC have lived long enough to celebrate their respective fiftieth anniversaries and even then, neither club is as celebrated as it was in the heydays of their successes as African champions and serial winners of local club competitions. Now, they are just going through the motions as their respective  fan base has shrunk to close to nothing.  Their fitful sponsors are state governors who seem always to have weightier matters on their confused minds so that these once mighty clubs has been reduced to the status of orphans. This is not the case with football clubs in other African countries, specifically Ghana and South Africa to give two pertinent examples. The oldest football club in Ghana is the Accra based Accra Hearts of Oak which was founded in 1911 and since then has been building a following which is why it still attracts crowds of forty thousand spectators to their home games. Their bitter rivals, Ashanti Kotoko based in Kumasi has been going strong since 1935 and is still winning trophies and pulling in crowds into its Baba Yara stadium, the same stadium where Nigeria has never won a match against Ghana. Over in South Africa, there are two teams based in Soweto and their rivalry is so fierce that the Soweto derby is as hotly contested as any of the famous derbies all over the world. Orlando Pirates was formed in 1937 whilst her bitter rivals the Kaizer Chiefs started off in 1970. Over in Durban, the AmaZulu football club has been in existence since 1932 and is still one of the top teams in the South African league. This situation exists because these clubs are not sponsored by any government department and have a solid fan base so that several generations of the same family can support their team and pas their support on to future generations. In contrast the Nigerian football cemetery is full of clubs which had their few seasons under the sun and died, un-mourned, unsung and no longer remembered except by confessed fanatics like me who for no discernible reason, cherish the past. My romance with ECN could not go far beyond the ten years when the Electric Corporation of Nigeria considered their exciting football team worthy of continued support.

With ECN Football Club in terminal decline, I had no choice but to go out in search a suitable replacement if only to plug the hole in my heart. Then, unlike now there was very little football on television and at that time the only football programme I could tap in to was a highlights package of English league matches which had been played more than a year before they were brought to our television screens in Lagos. The matches were very old but because there had been no news of them before they were broadcast, they retained a compelling freshness which made me sit down in cheerful expectation every Monday night according to the programming schedule of the one available television station in Lagos. A few people reading this would have worked out that I am talking here of a time around the end of the sixties but for those who have not been able to read any of the clues provided, I can confirm that I was writing about the period immediately following my release from the secondary school in 1968. In the wake of that important occurrence, I had a gap period of a little over nine months to navigate through before presenting myself in the precincts of any university to which I had been admitted and so I had the time and the opportunity of tuning in to watch matches from the English first division.

At the end of the 1967/68 season, the Manchester City Football Club had, unknown to me at the time, won the English First Division championship. Because they were champions, many of their matches from that season were often featured on the highlight package available on Lagos television a year later. That programme was compelling viewing for me which is how I was introduced to the all conquering Man, City team with the irresistible attacking trio of Bell, Lee and Summerbee. They blew me away and I could not get enough of them and this is why more than fifty years later, I still cannot get Manchester City out of my head. Later on, my addiction to this team had the logical consequence of attracting me to the city of Manchester. After graduating from the University of Ife in 1972 I was employed as a Graduate Assistant in my alma mater and given the opportunity of sponsorship to any university to which I could gain admission for postgraduate studies. Manchester University then and now is one of the most prestigious British universities outside Oxford and Cambridge and that is one of the reasons why I applied to it for admission but just as compelling was the fact that it was home to the Manchester City Football Club and living there meant that I had virtually unrestricted access to what in my mind I had begun to call my team, the place of refuge after the distress caused by the fall from grace of my first love the exciting ECN FC of Lagos. I spent three years as a student in Manchester and throughout that period, I enjoyed many happy hours at Maine Road where MCFC played in those days, being entertained royally by a team which at that time as now, played an intoxicating brand of football which kept me enthralled and explains why they still set my ageing heart racing.

My long term support of Manchester City has certainly not been a frolic, far from it. For the first decade of my journey with the Cityzens was uniformly enjoyable as they were one of the power houses of English football and had the other Manchester team and inveterate enemy constantly in their rear view mirror. Then, slowly but inexorably the situation changed and then we were the underdogs and as fortunes rose in the other half of Manchester, the sky blues began to the slide right down to the third tier of English football. We were not just sliding down but Manchester United was climbing up to the very pinnacle of football glory, winning trophies foreign and domestic with heart breaking regularity. We were not even in the same league and so did not have the opportunity of derby games which we had been known to win against all the odds occasionally. Even through those darkest of days of collective despair, we kept the faith and since our club was still alive we held on to the hope that the glory days would come back, in the same way that football fans all over the world hold on tenaciously to their optimism about their club even if the cloud hanging over their club did not have any discernible silver club. Hope is however ruthlessly expunged when the object of affection and loyalty is suddenly no longer available. Manchester City has survived all manner of vicissitudes over the last one hundred and forty-two years and is not likely like ECN to just disappear anytime soon. That the team is now once again a powerhouse of world football is an icing on the cake for her loyal supporters and I for one cannot wait for the next season to begin so that we can continue our secure domination of the English Premier League.