Keshi’s formula will save Nigerian league
It goes without saying that television is the most powerful tool to promote the business of sport. Football without television is like tea without sugar. At the same time Supersport transmits matches of the English Premiership league, EPL, with devastating effect on the followership of local domestic leagues. Most stadia around the continent these days […]
It goes without saying that television is the most powerful tool to promote the business of sport. Football without television is like tea without sugar. At the same time Supersport transmits matches of the English Premiership league, EPL, with devastating effect on the followership of local domestic leagues. Most stadia around the continent these days have the same characteristic – bare stadia terraces during local league matches. Except, perhaps, in South Africa, everywhere else on the continent the situation is the same – empty seats, sparse crowds and poor fields.
Recently, Steve Mawuyenga, the former Vice Chairman of Accra Hearts of Oak FC, one of Ghana’s most famous football Clubs, called me up from his Accra base and expressed concern over the matter, and wondered if I had any simple and workable idea about what could be done immediately to arrest the frightening situation. Steve was asking a question that has been reverberating in the boardrooms of many football federations across the continent for many years.
Of course, nothing can be done to diminish public interest in the English Premier league. It is such a well-packaged, well-televised, well-promoted, well-marketed and well-publicised irresistible product that any effort to tamper with it is doomed to fail. The motivation should not be to compete with it or make it the standard to beat, but to use it as a compass to create our own local football league variant that must have its own unique colourisation and excitement full of exceptionally gifted and celebrated stars with a brand of football that will hold captive all those watching at venues or on television. What needs to be done is to introduce some creative content around the leagues that will ensure that whilst the public still patronise the English Premiership, they follow, enjoy and support their own local leagues as well.
Of course, this means that football administrators must engage artistic and technical creative minds to develop concepts that must make the Nigerian football league venues very friendly, colourful, crime-free, hooliganism-free, family-friendly, hygienic, and very entertaining. There must also be a proper program to establish a culture of club-supportership at the grassroots level where the people shall see football as business and a celebration of talent, the clubs as their property and investment, match venues as their theatre for artistic expression, and the actual matches as pure drama! Today, in Nigeria, even with scanty crowds and low patronage, supporters have turned football grounds into theatres of war where ‘not to win is to die!’. Attitudes must change for football to find its feet again at domestic level in most African countries, just as this whole subject would make superb intellectual discourse at another level and forum. Meanwhile, what interests me most as I write this is the one item in a long list of what needs to be done to kick-start addressing the issue. Something is sprouting in the Nigerian football space that may interest other African countries. It interests me.
Football is about the stars in the game. Stars are the exceptionally gifted players that do the exceptional and, sometimes, extra-ordinary things on the field of play. No league can thrive well and be marketable without them. Foreign leagues come to our local leagues, snatch away the best of our up-and-coming stars to burnish and colour their own leagues. Their clubs are passionately followed, matches are religiously watched, and the stadia are regular filled to capacity with fanatical fans, all due to the presence of the superstar players on parade. An Argentine national team visiting Nigeria will attract little spectatorship without the assured presence of Lionel Messi. Brazil without Pele was never the same team. Pele singlehandedly filled the King George V Stadium in January of 1969 when Santos FC visited Nigeria as part of the club’s African visit. For information purposes only, in that year the warring armies of Nigeria and Biafra temporarily set aside their differences and halted their war just to be able to follow Pele’s performance against Nigeria’s national team in Lagos on radio! Late Haruna Ilerika, even as a student in secondary school, singlehandedly filled stadia across the South-West of Nigeria in his days. Everyone wanted to see his mesmerising dribbling skills. ‘Superbrat’ Etim John Esin attracted thousands of spectators to match venues like nectar to honey everywhere his club, Calabar Rovers FC, played. He was created by the media and promoted like no other player before, or since. They made him a god and every Nigerian, including those that knew nothing about the game, wanted to go to football grounds to see for themselves the wonder that was Etim. But it was Rashidi Yekini’s case that fully opened my eyes. Some 6 years ago, even when the debilitating
effect of the English Premiership was well known and acknowledged, Rashidi Yekini, after a 5-year layoff from competitive football returned to the domestic league to play for Gateway FC for one season. Aged and rusty as he was he still filled every stadium around the country every time he played during the 10 months period. He was such a mystical star, a goal-scoring machine, that people thronged to the local fields to watch him play. Rashidi split football fans between watching their irresistible Premiership matches and watching him control, turn, twist, race and shoot at goal at the local stadia. Thats the drawing power of an authentic football star!
The answer to Steve Mawuyenga’s question can be found in how to create authentic football stars even within our local leagues in an endless stream so that even when many go away prematurely to other foreign leagues, as they inevitably would, there will still be enough gifted stars to sustain great interest in the domestic league and massive followership by the football fans. Thats what is sprouting now in Nigerian football. I am not so sure what Stephen Keshi’s motivation for his recent actions and rhetorics are, but I can see great prospects in his recognition, elevation and promotion of Nigerian players in the domestic league, and his decision to raise a standing national team of home-based players. What a brilliant idea! When you look at the league the way it is now, one may not easily see and appreciate the budding stars as a result of poor coaching, poor pitches (including all those with artificial turfs), too much emphasis on technicalities at the expense of artistic expression and lack of financial incentives. But the opportunity to train under a coach of Keshi’s pedigree and experience, and to play in the Super Eagles without first moving to a European league, provides new hope. Stephen Keshi has been saying and doing the rights things so far. Rather than use the players’ movement to Europe as pre-condition for being a deserving Eagle, as has been the practise, Keshi proposes to use the psychological impetus of becoming internationals from the local league to give the players the essential physical transformational lift that will make them instant stars locally. Once they become stars and continue to play in the local league, with the help of the media drawing attention and celebrating them, interest to watch them will heighten, fans will return to the grounds to watch the new kids put on a show, and new names that will soon become a singsong will rent the air, and the empty terraces will start to fill slowly and steadily, once again!