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AUGUST 6, 2016 • THISDAY, THE SATURDAY NEWSPAPER
AFRICA PLAYS
with KENNETH EZAGA 0807 0530 677, zigi199@yahoo.com
NPFL TITLE RACE
C’mon Rangers! Let’s Win this Thing for the Old Order The Nigerian Professional Football League is just 11 weeks from the finish line and I am unabashedly rooting for my enemies Rangers International FC, who provisionally lead the table with 10 games to go, to finally lift the crown for the first time in 32 years! Yep, for some of us the NPFL goes that far back and even farther back. Call us the old order, we were the people who slept overnight in stadiums to watch our Nigerian clubs play crucial games, we were the people who rooted for our clubs as they fought battles for the ages, we are the people who have a thousand stories to tell about the Nigerian league and clubs. Back then four clubs were generally seen as the pillars of the league. There was the no-nonsense Rangers, the gentlemen from the ancient city of Ibadan - IICC Shooting Stars, the noisy Stationary Stores of Lagos and the sexy young athletes from Benin City, my dear club, Bendel Insurance FC. On our day we crushed Rangers, dismissed IICC and beat Stationary Stores in their own backyard. Sadly however, the old order has been in the shadows for decades. The last time any won the league was 18 years ago! When Shooting Stars claimed their fifth title in 1998. Since then some ‘small boys’ courtesy of support from their state governments have dominated us. So please pardon me for supporting Rangers, I want the old order restored and Rangers triumphing this season may spark that.
I
made a new friend at the Lagos Country Club recently. This gentleman is Dr. Arinze Onubogu and he is the chairman of the tennis section. A general argument about who should coach the Super Eagles of today somehow morphed into the local league. I was pleasantly shocked to find out how up-to-the-minute he was in the matters of the NPFL at a time Nigerians have become more European about the European leagues than the Europeans themselves. We dived into enthralling stories about the times when our clubs ruled the roost. He being a staunch Rangers fan meant I could not resist ribbing him about how we thrashed them 3:0 in the Challenge Cup final in 1978. It is a popular tale between supporters of both clubs, and he had his own payback stories. It was fun. It is easy to feel the passion when the old order talks about Nigerian football, our Nigerian clubs were the centers of our universe. We are the ones with the sort of compelling stories the NPFL needs to grow more popular with modern day Nigerians. We need that at this time, we need the league to attract more sponsors, to attract more fans and consequently to create new jobs and wealth in our stricken economy. This is not to say I do not value the contributions of the new order championed by the likes of Enyimba International and Kano Pillars, after all Enyimba now hold the record for the most NPFL titles won, while Pillars recently won three straight titles. Both have been utterly dominant in recent years, claiming 11 of the last 15 titles, and both are in contention for the crown this year. Still, when men were men and women were won by men who deserved them, Enyimba were upstarts and Pillars were not even born. It would be fascinating to see the old order rise again and probably for us to engineer a healthy rivalry between the old and the new. It would be riveting and I would desperately want Bendel Insurance to be part of this. Bendel Insurance FC as a campaign issue A gubernatorial election campaign is actually ongoing in Edo State and I will like to call on all Bendel Insurance fans to make the club a campaign issue. Maybe because I have only ever loved this club or maybe because of the indomitable spirit and swag of your typical Bendelite, Edo-Delta, this is one club I believe has an unbelievable marketing potential if properly tended. This club belongs to the Nigerian top-flight and nowhere else. It is insulting to see us struggle in the lower division. Thankfully we lead our group in the NNL and, fingers crossed, could return to the top-flight next season, but this is not cast in stone and we have waited too long. We need to have the
Enugu Rangers
candidates tell us what their plan for the club is, and if they do not believe that the government should fund the club, then they should midwife a process of getting it into the hands of a credible investor. This would be great for the club for a variety of reasons. Firstly, the NPFL is growing in popularity and the sooner we are back on board the better. Success in the increasingly richer league would help put many more people to work in the state. Young talents will get better attention, infrastructure will be upgraded, beverages companies, farmers (who produce the food we eat when we enjoy our sports), TV and radio broadcasters, the print media, medical professionals, lawyers, agents et al, are all players that can benefit. I doubt it can be disputed that any event or phenomenon unites our typical divided peoples more than football. The upsides are many, but you have to play big. Dream big people – the world is putting billions into football The leadership of the NPFL recently
signed a partnership deal with their Spanish La Liga counterparts and that is a great start for any of our clubs looking to go global. You just need a good brand – like Bendel Insurance of course – with a rich history and wide fan base, then you need to be in the Nigerian top-flight. The old order leads in this and can attract some serious investments from overseas. They can solicit for partnerships with global brands like Valencia, Atletico Madrid, Malaga etc. Those clubs would put down some money annually in aid; send over technical teams to assist in talent development, coaching and management, and all they would require is the right of first refusal to your best talents. In a country that has produced global stars like Austin ‘Jay Jay’ Okocha, Nwankwo Kanu, Sunday Oliseh, George Finidi, Mikel Obi, Kelechi Iheanacho, etc, surely there must be rich overseas clubs betting on finding more of such. Today a single player is about to cost more than 100m pounds (almost N50b) in transfer fees, surely investing about
five million pounds yearly to search for a clutch of new big Nigerian talents would sound like a sensible investment to these hypercompetitive overseas clubs. And even if you cannot interest the Europeans, woo the Chinese. They have got billions to burn and are paying silly money for players past they sell-by dates. The Chinese have plenty of business in Africa and are looking to strengthen their hold on the continent. Before this fever cools, jump in now and partner one of the Chinese Super League clubs. We may even be fortunate to get one of those wealthy Chinese tycoons to put up what he may consider peanuts into Bendel Insurance, for instance, and take us to the top of Africa. Billions of dollars are crisscrossing the globe yearly in football investments, but we are blind to these because we are lost in the English Premier League and other European league, basically playing the role of cheerleaders. It is madness, because we easily have the dynamics to be far and away the best and richest league in Africa.