Nigeria Premier League Yearns For Past Glory

On Sunday June 12, two of Nigeria’s biggest clubs in the last four decades, Shooting Stars a.k.a 3SC and Rangers International, contested a league game in Abeokuta. 

  Forty years ago, after the country’s Civil War, it would have been the match everyone talked about. The media would have been awash with the fact that the two clubs that represented different philosophies and regions in the country were about to rekindle their rivalry having won 11 championships between them. 

However, during this recent face-off, the players traded tackles in front of a near empty stadium. Apart from those who watched on television because there was no competing programming from Europe on that fateful day, there was little interest. The game, like many things in local Nigerian football, has lost its sheen.

In the past decade, the Nigerian league has suffered a demise of colours. Fans have kept away from the stadiums and a coterie of them can now be found on Saturday evenings watching European league football in television viewing centres.

In Lagos, the commercial capital, over a thousand shops screen the English Premier League. A report by TELL magazine in 2008 estimated that more than 500 outlets sell jerseys of major European clubs while viewing centre entrepreneurs make at least $200,000 monthly from screening live games.

In all this, the Nigerian league has gone to sleep. Lagos has no representation in the Premier League, as it’s most supported side, – the Stationery Stores, have been battling with ownership issues for the better part of two decades. And without the impact of Lagos, the support base of the league has nosedived.

 Adebayo Olowo-Ake, a Stores supporter who is leading a revival of the side, told Goal.com “SSFC supporters would charter all the buses in Lagos in those days and head for these Nigerian cities a day before the game, and residents would know that ‘The Lagos people had arrived.’ SSFC took on the might of governments, for these other clubs were government-owned, unlike Stores, that was wholly private and even better supported than them.”

 In the past, all the major clubs were owned by business people and as such ran as profit-making ventures. Today, they have all been taken over by state governments and are run as political tools. This has brought about a lack of checks and balances and a lackadaisical attitude towards the sport. “They’ve taken the soul out of football and that’s why fans do not come out anymore,” Oluwashina Okeleji of BBC Sport told Goal.com.

 It was a sentiment echoed by former Nigeria international Segun Odegbami in his column last week. “In Nigerian football everything is about government. Until the economic and political situation changes, proper professional football, the sort that will bring up a private organisation as defined by the FIFA statutes, cannot exist in most of Africa.” he wrote on the SuperSport website.

 Also, spurious refereeing decisions that ensure home teams have the upper hand with the award of scandalous penalties are a bane of the league. A penalty is gifted to home sides in virtually one out of every two games played in the season and this makes sure that fans keep away from the stadiums. Many say there’s no joy knowing that your club will always win their home clashes, even when they play badly.

 Poor pitches also reduce the beauty of the game. Many of the stadiums, except a few that were repaired during the country’s hosting of the FIFA U17 tournament two years ago, do not have playable surfaces.

Pundits have called for retiring Nigerian stars abroad to return home to play for a few years in order to ignite fans’ desire and passion for the league. The country’s highest scoring player, Rashidi Yekini, did that a few years ago when he featured for Julius Berger. The stands were packed again, even if it was short-lived. Imagine Kanu or Okocha in the jersey of Enyimba or Kano Pillars – the fans would go crazy. No other stars followed Yekini’s footsteps because pay conditions are poor. Signing-on fees are rarely delivered and local players chase after the Golden Fleece in Europe.

 The Nigerian Premier League board has a great deal to do to rediscover local interest in the top flight. First, the league must be given back to private hands and clear its stables of corruption. Then try to bring Lagos back into the picture; it is, after all, where the bulk of the fans exist.