Four winners have emerged from the just concluded 2022 edition of The Penalty King series.
The competition that took place at Stone Field featured 186 contestants participating in four different categories based on their ages and genders.
Ikpeka Eberechukwu defeated 26 other contestants to win the Female Kids category while Emmanuel Lala emerged the winner out of the 73 contestants that competed in the Male Kid category.
Chiamaka Ezekwugo won the Adult female category beating 16 other contestants as Tari Joweigha was crowned the champion of the Adult male category defeating 68 other contestants.
Sports247 Nigeria had a chat with the organizer of The Penalty King, Mr. Ibukunle Oluwafemi to discuss matters pertaining to the just concluded event and the history of the competition in general.
Can you introduce yourself to our readers?
“I am Ibikunle Exquisite Oluwafemi, the founder and owner of Exquisite Models International.
And I am also the originator of this penalty king series so you know.”
Can you give us a brief insight into how The Penalty King series came into existence?
“The field we played the game on is adjacent to the place I grew up in Festac town, it is our area field, it is a stone field. The place normally used to be a place where guys gather to smoke and take drugs. It was a bad zone at the time.
So I was thinking of something to purify the field like giving it a more positive image because they do play football there too and basketball. Ordinarily, people used to like to gamble on this penalty on their own before but I just kind of packed it and turned it into a general event where the young and old can participate. That’s it basically.”
Can you briefly discuss what The Penalty King is all about?
“Penalty king is a periodic community charity event. It is a sporting event, a football event precisely but there are no actual matches where people just come out, it is an individual sport and it is a day event people just come out and participate for free.
We have different categories. The adult category is male and female, kids category to that’s below 15years male and female as well making it four categories in all.
So In your category, you come out and kick the ball, if you score you advance to the next round, if you lose you are out of the tournament so if you keep on scoring and other people keep scoring in your category we will shift the ball backward to make the scoring a bit more difficult until the winner of that category emerges.
The overall winner is the adult male category so that is the main penalty king. Then we have the last woman standing, the last king standing male, and the last king standing female and they all win cash prizes and products from our supporters. But this particular season 7 was in the memory of coach Emeka Okpo, who used to be the empire of the games before his demise this January.”
What made this season’s edition of the competition so interesting?
“The fascinating thing about this particular season is that someone is winning for the second time.
And this is the first time someone that has won before will win again. Before we had different winners for different seasons from season one to season six but the guy that won this season is the same game that won the very first edition that is the maiden edition in 2016 his name is Tarry so he won again this season 7.
Even he played the other seasons but he did not win so that’s just the fascinating thing about this particular season to me. And the turn out too was okay.”
He further stated that this year’s event was more fascinating because it is the first since 2020 as the competition was temporarily suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic regulation.
“If you know, this season 7 is like a comeback because we did not host the competition in 2020 and 2021 due to covid 19 regulations here. So this one was truly anticipated and the turnout was okay,” he concluded.
