Football is all about the supporter’s base and that id the basics while the big clubs keeps getting richer and the smaller clubs struggling to meet up. The fan base has no doubt being the back bone of many club financial source especially money realized from match day ticket. While some other clubs find it extremely difficult to sale about 80% of such ticket other some few others have little space to accommodate their yearning fans to come watch their home matches which has resulted to expansion of stadium capacity, temporarily relocation or building of entirely new stadium. These are the thing we see happening in Europe but such cannot be said here. Yes, I will admit my bias seeing that most of these European clubs or football leagues have been in existence over a century with a lot of excellent administration and there is no such need for comparism. I will x-ray a bit about the local league and its short comings despite being some decades old.
Nigeria local fans
The Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) was founded in the mid 1970’s. Even though I will admit that the league has not being at its best due to some administration bottle neck but club keeps surviving each season. Every league has its identity and drive peculiar to it. Most African league are physical and require a lot of physical stamina yo survive unlike some League where entertainment is much visible. The local football here is not popular of talked about like those in Europe. Some fans may not count unto 5 local league clubs but will give you all the history and latest update about their foreign counterpart. The singular reason being that, the state government sponsors about 90 percent of these clubs make it very un-lucrative for investors due to fans altitude to watching local matches. Imagine fans going to watch local matches and want free entrance to games even when they are requested to pay less than $2. Some of the times, free ticket are given to locals to troop out to support their team and still yet not many will turn up.
Well, the locals will not be blamed out rightly due to the unattractiveness of the games coupled with day light officiating corruption of home teams wanting to win at all cost and the referees intimidated by local fans to give them advantages. The biggest threat has often being beating the officials if the local teams ends up losing or the home club bribing the officials ahead of time by taking care of their bills and accommodation prior to the match with some white envelops that follows it.
Another reason has been lack of vibrant sponsorship of the league. Yes not brand will want to spend much on advert without recouping their investment and this has been the challenges of some brands here. Globacom; a telecommunication network own by an indigene has been very supportive of the league over the years and keeps investing huge amount of money into the league. Whether they get return on this investment is what I can’t say.
I will not end up this post without admitting that there have been a lot of improvement in the league as well as we are getting to see privately sponsored clubs like Ifeanyi Uba fc, MFM fc Remo Stars etc coming into the league and surprisingly we are seeing the league turning from what it used to be to more commenting attributes. Few times, we see teams winning away matches without feud and officiating is relatively improving. In coming years, we are hoping that the league will be thrown more into the spot light as good administrators continue to succeed each other.
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