For Jenkins Alumona, the Managing Director at Flykite Productions, the sports events marketing company, behind the recently concluded Naija Super 8 football tournament, an intervention project in the area of sports is not strange.
Alumona and his team have a proclivity for reviving comatose sports like it did with boxing, practically bringing it back from the dead with the now-famous GOtv Boxing Night. The project has stood the test of time since its debut in 2015 and is growing stronger.
The former journalist said the essence of Naija Super 8 was to win back thousands of fans to the Nigerian domestic football league.
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“I think it is a fallacy to assume that Naija Super 8 is not a contribution to the Nigerian domestic league,” began Alumona who has held many portfolios including a stint at Globacom, since he left the newsroom in the 1990s. “So, the league is one leg of our domestic football and our domestic football is not just the league.
“That is one point. The second point is that a pre-season tournament like the Naija Super 8 is designed to help the league itself prepare for the league; that is to better the league.
“Talking about the essence of the Naija Super 8? It is a preseason competition designed to help bring back the fans to Nigerian football. We note that prior to this effort, the football itself has not grown to what it used to be in the past. It is not following the trajectory of growth in the past; because the fans have somehow dissolved themselves from it.
“And so, the design is to realign the fans with the clubs and football. We believe that the fans are integral to the league. They are essentially the football itself. “The league is only as good as the fans make it. Naija Super 8 was designed therefore to get the fans back into this fray.”
Done deal
Looking back at the competition, which rounded off with a pack-full stadium during the final match between Remo Stars and Sporting Lagos, Alumona noted that the essence of the competition was achieved.
“I will say that we started to and have not fully gotten what we have set out to achieve. There are several legs, and several factors: from coming to the stadium to the fans that watched on television, the fans who don’t know about it, and renewing their interest in Nigerian football is another factor. Getting the fans to come to the stadium is a success. We can say we got 100 percent there. “We don’t know if we have had a bigger stadium, what we would have achieved, but as for this year, we achieved good results in bringing fans back to the stadium. For fans watching from home, the measurement is not in yet, but we believe that we have a lot of people watching from home from the interactions that we also got on social media. We had a lot of success there.
“Now, for the fans that did not watch, that did not come to the stadium and how much their interest in club football has returned we are yet to measure as well. It is only when we get that result that we can come back and say we have achieved all the factors that we set out to achieve.”
Between hard work and team work
The milestones covered, he said were achieved through dint of hard work and teamwork.
“A lot of work and a lot of people were involved. We invested a lot in it. I like to say it is not about one person or one team. There are several teams involved. The number one supporter is our chairman Chief Adewunmi Ogunsanya who always says ‘if you do it for just one sport and you don’t do it for other sports you are not doing it as far as it should go’.
“So, football is the next on the agenda for us and we are going to spend some time on, hopefully, to get to that success point.
“But, our biggest partner on this project is Multichoice. It is also responsible largely for the success of it. The support was massive with a lot of resources put into it. For example, Supersport showing all the games live from Eket is a huge resource that we don’t have.
“Then, support from the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF). The board of the NFF led by the President, the General Secretary and the entire team of the NFF is also huge. It gave us the kind of technical support and backing that we needed. The football clubs were also wonderful. All the clubs did well. The NPFL, the NNL, and the people who work with them helped us. The support we got from them cannot be quantified. They gave an uncommon commitment to this project. Flykite was just the centre of it.”
Profit margins
Though Alumona could quantify the Naira and Kobo put into the maiden Naija Super 8, he posited that profit was the last thing on their minds.
“You don’t make a profit from the beginning. Profit is not what this is about. For instance, I tell people that if you have a 100,000-seated stadium filled up, and everyone pays N10,000 to see the game, it would not be able to run the football. It is not really at the beginning about making a profit. It is about creating a property and I think we have achieved that. It is not talking about profitability in the years ahead.”
Like the highly successful GOtv Boxing, Naija Super 8, the marketing guru assured it is here to stay: “It will certainly continue to be Naija Super 8. Six of the 8 teams will continue to be determined by the fans of Nigerian football who voted for those teams. From what we saw this year, most of the big teams still competed in the Super 8 playoffs. The teams that win will still come to the finals. The hope is that down the line, once we give it the kind of body that we want it to have, we would be looking at maybe teams from outside Nigeria for some of the wild cards. That is sometime in the future. We are still doing the post-mortem of the event and we are hoping that in the next weeks or month, we’ll see clearly where we are going.
“The efforts of the NFF, the NPFL, and the NNL to create a super calendar for Nigeria football will also help us to have a clearer picture of where we are going. I think that Alhaji Ibrahim Gusau is committed to giving the Nigerian league a stable calendar because that will help design the future. He sounds it, he says it, and I think that will help in the growth of Nigerian football.”
Wild cards
It is of interest to note that one of the wild card entries, Sporting Lagos, a team that has just gained promotion to the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) came out tops in the competition. Jenkins says the result was a testament to the dynamism of the game.
“It was not our design that a wildcard team would win. How do you do that? It is not our making. You saw the games. We have no way of knowing that the team that got one of the wild cards will win. Maybe, they have some home advantage, but after watching that game I do not know if that even counted for much. I think they were just a better team on those days that they won. That is football. It is not something that you pre-determine. And it is not part of our culture to do that. It came out all good.”
Refereeing palaver
Jenkins boldly scored officiating referees pass mark in the competition, though he wasn’t oblivious of some errors in calls, which the organisers plan to minimize in subsequent editions.
“So, one of the things we did this year was to buy some of the best communication equipment for the referees and train them how to use it. I will score them somewhere between 65 to 75 percent in this tournament and will score the organizers between 70 and 75 percent
“I think that we are on to something good and this is down to a lot of work and encouragement, even for the Nigeria Referee Association. Even in the best leagues of the world, there are errors. We see that happening everywhere all over the world. What we do as the organizer is to minimize the errors. The NFF and the NPFL have been doing a lot in that regard too and last season they did well in that direction.
“It is all about minimizing those errors by better training, better exposure, better analysis and better preparation for the referees. And I think a lot is going on in that direction. I don’t think the Nigerian referees are worse than all sectors of the country. Actually, they are better than in many sectors and encouragement is what is needed to make them better. I’m optimistic that next year, we shall minimize all those errors, even further. That is the plan.”
Video Assistant Refereeing coming
“It is important so that people who make errors can have the opportunity to look at it again and correct it. We are able to see the wrong call because we have the opportunity to see it again and again but the referees do not have the opportunity to do that while they are on the pitch. So, we have to allow them to see it again and make them correct that error. It is a welcome development.”
Alumona said they are not in a hurry to move onto another turf having grown the boxing project for eight years before moving into football.
“You see it is like a man who sets on a long journey and finally gets to his first stop after a long trek, he will first settle down at this stop and improve it before moving to the next. So, we are happily here now in Nigerian football and we are going to dwell here and get it right before moving on to another thing. I think that is the smart thing to do. This is just the beginning. The Nigerian league is just coming back to what it used to be and if we continue in this manner, national teams’ coaches will begin to see the good players and get them to national camp. We have to get the league back where we used to be in the 70s and 80s and the process is on.”
What next for Alumona?
Alumona is also focused on the task ahead: “I’m a person who doesn’t worry about where I want to be, I worry about where I am and what I can do at that particular time. So, I was in journalism and I’ve worked in marketing companies and for top-tier companies for 30 years. I’ve always wanted to do my best and not worry too much about where I want to be. However, I want a better society and whatever I think I can do to make it better, I do. Of course, I work with high quality people both internally and as partners and consultants. It is about tapping people to achieve a goal and when I do that I don’t think about what I’m doing next.”
Asked about a picture of him holding up two fingers, like a victory sign on the final day of the tournament, he said it was a harmless gesture that became iconic.
He said: “I was asking for two people to come and pick something and I didn’t even know that would get into the picture. It wasn’t a victory sign and some people have called my attention to it after that. I assure you that I have no idea what was going on. I wasn’t even looking at the cameraman. In other words, if it was a victory sign it is a victory for Nigerian football.”