Who can retrieve the beautiful game in Nigeria from club owners who want to serve as ‘owners of the clubs’ and also help to organise the league matches? Wouldn’t there be a conflict of interest at some points during the competition? Where is such a thing done with a candidate for an examination also becoming the examiner? Nobi juju be that? Isn’t it a shame that club owners who should be insisting on getting the league to be in tandem with the European leagues’ kickoff dates are the ones being the cog in the wheels of progress? If these people know their onions, they should be worried that the domestic league has no calendar on which the corporate world and well-meaning Nigerians can plan to render financial support to make the league solvent.
Who doesn’t know when the European leagues start and end? No club owner dares challenge what has been in existence for a while. This calendar is what business firms and individuals use to plan their yearly fiscal budgets. The calendar guides them in arriving at business decisions to back the different leagues in Europe wholesomely. Firms’ monies aren’t theirs. They belong to shareholders whose decisions encourage them to plough their resources into sports businesses. Of course, no firm would love to associate its goods and services with organisations dogged with controversies, sharp practices etc.
Club owners should do a quick rethink after reading what happened in Italy this week. On Wednesday, we saw how one Udinese FC of Italy player walked towards Victor Osimhen and demanded the Nigerian’s SSC Napoli of Italy’s shirt at halftime. Osimhen obliged him by taking off his top. Osimhen could afford the luxury of giving away his jersey knowing that even before coming onto the pitch before the game started, he had, at least, four others in his drawer in the team’s dressing room. Can any Nigerian club owned by these so-called people allow their players to swap shirts, let alone give out the club’s property even before the end of the game? These are the ones who want full disclosure. Meddlesome interlopers in the game, if you ask me. Have you asked yourself why Nigerian clubs hardly have the names of the players on the back of their shirts for easy identification? You tell me. Who is it that would dare ask these club owners to disclose their jersey contracts? Where can any club owner point out where their jerseys and other apparel are in stock? Isn’t these kinds of shopping outlets that European clubs use to make themselves solvent?
Some Nigerians just like to have power even if it means standing the truth on its head. Club owners want to hijack the league’s organisation in the face of all the ills and disservices in the game as perpetuated in the domestic league matches. Thrice the commencement date of the 2024 Nigeria Premier Football League was announced, but thrice it was postponed because the club owners had issues with certain aspects of the contracts signed by the league board. Really! The club owners wanted a full disclosure. What does that mean for a body that cannot tell us how much their clubs are worth? A body that cannot tell us how much they earn from gate takings for the year. A body that cannot tell the world how much they earned from intra and inter-club transfer fees?
Who is fooling who? How many clubs owned by these so-called people have websites where everything about the club is laid bare for the public scrutiny? Isn’t it ironic that a body that is so secretive in disclosing who the insurers of their clubs are now want to poke their noses in others’ affairs? A body, which takes delight in owing players, coaches and backroom staff their wages running into several months other times close to years, leaving their victims with the tardy option of self-help by seizing the clubs’ vans on away soils.
A few years back, one of the state-owned clubs had its real owners seeking to revamp the squad. At a meeting, this real owner wanted to know the players on the payroll who were bona fide members of the team. This official was shocked to find out that the team’s big boys weren’t among the bona fide players. Those who truly made the team shine were there on loan. He lost his patience and ordered a proper investigation into the apparent shenanigan.
Surprised? Don’t be. Such unsportsmanlike acts happen in most of these teams. You only realise this rip-off when such players sign for foreign clubs. How many teams have fulfilled all the requirements enshrined in the Club Licensing Act? It is only in the NPFL that a club will sack as many as 25 players at the end of the season. The question, which throws itself up as a sore thumb is if such players have only one-year contracts. Wasn’t it a top club official who boasted that a league title-winning coach did nothing to help the club achieve the feat? The official boasted that he knew how the team won the title that year.
This issue of graduated measures of fulfilling the Club Licensing requirements is simply a failure of leadership or should I say witchcraft, which shouldn’t be tolerated. Professional football began in 1990 in Nigeria and it is despicable to note that 33 years after the league still wears diapers in implementing basic rules of the game. It is equally disappointing that league boards can sit at meetings, and make pronouncements about the commencement of the competition’s kickoff dates yet won’t stick to it, indeed, it is customarily for previous league boards to announce kickoff dates like the new NPFL Board chairman Gbenga Otolorin Elegbede has done by promising an August 26 date. True to type, the date was moved to September 9 and now today September 30. I hope the league games truly begin today.
Club owners just trumpet what the NFF want the league board to do. NFF on its part would tell everyone that the league board is autonomous, yet the simple task of picking match officials is theirs just as the right to punish them. They are quick to tell you that it is the rule as provided by FIFA. NFF also appoints most of the league board members who are usually their allies. Anything not possible in the Nigerian league doesn’t exist.
Nigeria’s sports administrators should always look at the bigger picture which looks forward to making the sporting industry the veritable ground for stemming unemployment in Nigeria. Is sports truly “play play” as one governor once described it? Who will challenge us to see sports as a platform to bolster the country’s revenue? Doesn’t the government know that sports is the best vehicle for massive employment?
Who can stop these undertakers from killing our league which has produced several soccer greats? Need I mention names?
Yearly, our representatives in the CAF inter-club competitions complain of lack of matches to keep their players in competitive form as the reason for their early exits. Why the NFF executive board members have turned deaf ears to this disturbing trend beats one’s imagination. It doesn’t matter if the country’s representatives take turns being eliminated from every round of the competitions. What insults our sensibilities is the yearly explanation after the teams must have crashed out that we would do something and nothing gets done about it.
