A strong piece of advice has gone out to egg heads of Nigeria’s National Sports Commission (NSC) to develop an effective calendar that will see major competitions hold in various cities across the country on a regular rotational basis.
Offering this suggestion as a process towards enhancing proper development and progress of sports in the country was the chief executive officer of Nigeria Economic Summit Group, Dr Tayo Aduloju, who told Sports247 that the NSC needs to put in place a monthly schedule of major competitions across the country.
Aduloju, who earlier in the day elucidated his points in a lecture he presented at the Sports Africa Investment Summit 2025 expatiated, “We discussed opportunities for collaboration to drive sports investments and see where they can come from.
I think sports opportunities can come from everywhere. That’s why we can have things like sports and technology, sports and education, sports and fashion, sports and entertainment, sports and tourism, etc.”
Aduloju then spoke about the marketing and followership potentials that Nigeria’s large population provides for investors to key into various aspects of sports and still make huge profits, hence his charge for better efforts from all stakeholders in the sector.
Aduloju further stated, “When a country is getting started with building sports as an industry, it’s important to leverage the demand.
Nigeria is a country of 200 million people, and we all love sports of different types … football, basketball … we are one of the biggest betters in combat sports, UFC, etc. So, what we need is a constant pool that leverages the demands for sports across the country.
“One way to do that is for the National Sports Commission to integrate a national sports calendar into the system. This would ensure that, almost every week, a major city of the country will host a prominent sports tournament, or a major event is going on.
If you do that, there will be a sports calendar that takes you from Port Harcourt in one month to Lagos the next and then to Kano.”
Aduloju concluded by reeling out the benefits of a rotational sports calendar across the country, tops of which he believes would be the discovery of more talents and emergence of several high performance centres to enhance better sports development across the country.
“There will be a blend and mixture of sports events that each part of the country is good at. This would also allow us to build centres of excellence for sports.
Not every city would be ready to host all kinds of sports. So, we’ll have, for example, Marathon Cities, Swimming Cities … where they have retained Olympic-size swimming pools that are globally standard and competitive.
You will have Basketball Cities Cricket Cities, Handball Cities, Beach Football Cities, etc.
“You can tell which cities would be good for various events, as the case may be. What we need to do is to leverage … let’s leverage what God has given us and enhance our unique factor conditions.
Match it to a national calendar for sports and let the federations do something different to excite various Nigerians. Let’s build arenas for sports as entertainment and competition all year long.
Once you do that, you create Layer 1, which allows you to be ready with a base of really nationally competitive athletes,” Aduloju affirmed.
 to develop an effective calendar){kind=link}