Support for the NPFL – Welcome aboard Senator Ben Murray-Bruce
The call for Nigerians to back the Nigerian Professional Football League has found a new high profile voice in politician and businessman Ben Murray-Bruce. The outspoken senator has in recent times been whipping up patriotic sentiments in a relentless Twitter onslaught, calling for patronage and support for local businesses as a way to get our stricken economy back on track. He has urged support for the likes of local car manufacturer Innoson, Nasco Foods, Arik Airlines and Aba manufacturers among others and this week someone drew my attention to his tweets on our domestic football. Finally, perhaps we are making some progress, albeit necessitated by our harsh economic realities. Some of us suspected we would get here, and that our businesses will be in trouble. We also knew that despite our unabashed sponsorship and support of European football, when the crunch came, we would be left on our own. The Arsenals, Chelseas, Manchester Uniteds, Barcelonas and Real Madrids will not come to the aid of the Nigerian economy, they will not be creating the jobs locally that our nation needs to bounce back. So, now appears that time when we must do the needful and invest our resources in the domestic game so we can create the jobs and wealth at home not abroad. As the senator has succinctly put it “We spend billions on European soccer and abandon our own local leagues. Sports can be a major employer of labor #BuyNaijaToGrowTheNaira”
AAt the risk of sounding like a broken record, supporting the NPFL is not a favour, but a business imperative. Sports create jobs, jobs lead to disposable income, and disposable income leads to business patronage and profits. For years now, while our league laid prostrate, our big business leaders have unwittingly spent billions promoting European football to Nigerians and this has seen them win millions of fans for leagues like the English Premier League, the Spanish La Liga, the Italian Serie A and the German Bundesliga. The consequence of this has been Nigerians shipping billions overseas yearly through TV networks and direct travels to watch football games and buy tons of merchandise overseas. Well payback time is time is here. Nigeria is broke, the naira is plunging, business sales are dipping and thousands are being thrown into the job market. I doubt the marketing managers who felt really smug about blowing billions on the European game in the last decade are feeling smug about the figures the sales are showing.
They always argue that they back the European game because that is what fans are watching, well they are still locked in that foolish logic in 2016 when the fans have lost their jobs or have had their salaries slashed. What is the point of promoting to people who do not have disposable income? Money that should have been used to support the local game and create jobs within have all been shipped away to instead create jobs overseas. I do not hear the British, Germans, Italians and Germans crying the way we do about fallen oil prices, I do not here them talking about devaluation and looking for loans to survive, and I can only hope we have learned some lessons.
Thanks to the senator for drawing attention to this. I personally do not know him closely and, being a bit circumspect about politicians, I would tread softly, but commonsense like this means people like me will be paying closer attention to him.
The Australian Open, loss of Chikatara and marketing lessons for Nigeria
I was watching the Australian Open ladies final match two Saturdays back when the thought hit me and I started taking notes. I have for some time now argued that, if successfully run, Nigerian sports would be largely funded and sustained with sponsorship dollars from foreign players. This looked the case at the Australian Open, because of the ten major sponsors I identified – Rolex, Emirates, Kia, IBM, Lacoste, Hisense, Optus, ANZ, Jacob’s Creek and CPA Australia, only the last four were native to Australia. Interestingly, most of these sponsors are businesses that have operations in Nigeria, albeit on a smaller scale, but have never been connected with our domestic sport simply because we have not lifted our game to levels that are attractive to these wealthy giants. If we want sports to attract the world to us, we desperately need to change our approach to how we design and market our game. The recent sale of Nigeria and Abia Warriors striker Chisom Chikatara to Moroccan club Wydad Casablanca just shows that we risk our football league being unattractive to fans and sponsors for quite some time to come.
I have consistently made the point that our sports lack quality star power. I believe the League Management Company, for instance, must do whatever it can to raise the star power in the NPFL. Without stars that inspire fans any sport can at best just oscillate in the realm of mediocrity. To achieve this, the LMC must work closely with other stakeholders to keep marketable stars in the NPFL for as long as they possibly can. Two weeks ago I made a case for why there was a need to pull all stops to retain Chikatara in our league. I saluted reports that a couple of our clubs were bidding to pay him fairly mega wages by Nigerian standards. I also advertised the burly youngster as a good endorsement choice for Nigerian brands because he had become something of a favourite with fans after his exploits at the recent African Nations Championship.
It is a shame that such a marketable star has left our league at just the right time for us to start milking his popularity and attracting real interest to the NPFL. How do we want the fans to look forward to the new NPFL season when we habitually sell our best players on the cheap? If we keep losing the likes of Chikatara, the NPFL will never be interesting enough to fans because of a lack of stars. We can make a case about patriotism, but this must be backed up with something that creates real value in the game, like a star fans can identify with. It may not be cheap to keep these types, but it is in our interest to do so.
Maybe the time has come for the LMC, working closely with the Nigeria Football Federation and clubs, to create regulations or even invest some of their own money in keeping stars like Chikatara at home for a year or two longer. That way we can all benefit from their popularity until a solid offer comes along from the more serious leagues of the world. The success rate of Nigerian players in North Africa does not in any way qualify as a move that is good for a top Nigerian talent as claimed by Warriors. How many Nigerian players have passed through North Africa to become big in the global game in recent times? How much will the Abia club make from this deal that they cannot make ten times more than if Chikatara stayed and is then scouted directly from Nigeria?
With a little paradigm shift, we will find that these players are even better off playing in a more successful NPFL and being bought directly from our Nigerian clubs than getting lost in some obscure leagues because of immediate gratification. For instance it will not be untypical to hear tomorrow that Wydad have refused to pay the player or pay the transfer fee and that the Warriors are threatening to go to FIFA. We need to look beyond the moment, to work together to make our league attractive or we will continue to feed off the crumbs of global sports. A Chikatara is probably worth hundreds of millions of naira to the LMC and any NPFL club when you consider what star power his kind can buy in terms of fans’ following and sponsorships. So paying him a decent wage that lets him live like a star and keeps him in the NPFL is actually a sound investment because those are the stars that will bring in the likes of Emirates, Qatar Airlines, Kia, Nike, Adidas, Puma and Adidas to our game.
Super Four missing the appeal of the Super Six
The recently-concluded Super Four tournament clearly missed the star quality of last year’s Super Six principally because the Flying Eagles and the Dream Team VI did not feature. The Super Six was won last year by the U-20 Flying Eagles, who beat all the NPFL teams, and the U-23 team finished second. There are two things we ought to have learned from that; the first is that Nigerian fans want to see more of the next big Nigerian stars than the usually older, slower and more physical players in the NPFL. As people like me have suggested in the past, our NPFL teams must embrace much younger players. The official ages paraded today are fooling no one. Secondly, because fans are guessing who would move to a big club next, the youth teams generate more attention and create more buzz in the traditional and social media. This is always a good way to blow up interest and attract fans and sponsors. So in the coming years, whether both age-specific teams are preparing for international competitions or not, invite them and keep the Super Six format. It will make the mini tournament much more fun and more marketable.