The revolution of the Bet9ja State leagues fill my thought, from Taraba to Nassarawa to Jigawa, and then Plateau, down to Delta, Ogun, Lagos (Ikorodu), and my own state, Ekiti, where the ovation has been loudest.
Three, four years back, the state leagues were in a state of comatose, Shola Ogunnowo, the Chief Operating Officer of the NLO, and the board have almost given up in the Div 3 playoffs and had succumbed to begging teams to just come to the match venue and they have won already.
The state league, a major grassroots football development tool, died a natural death, due to a lack of funds to the FA, God knows when that happened.
KC Gaming Limited, the owners of the Bet9ja franchise, established the events department to push the brand further down the line, to all the nooks and crannies of the entity called Nigeria. This was also to maintain its position as the number one gaming company in Nigeria. What an idea that has come to be! It is a big hit in less than three years of the startup.
So, State FAs in Nigeria’s football ecosystem could function if funded, wow!!! How come no one saw this? Especially the noisy but not effective Harrison Jallah and his cohorts in the players union.
The State FAs are supposed to be in charge of football administration and management at the state level and yet they don’t have offices, except for Kwara FA that got lucky, and some few others, that have borrowed offices in their state sports councils and commissions.
Many state-owned football clubs have a budget of several millions of naira (mine has #72m) and the state FAs have zero budget. Yet many claim the state FA chairmen are, in their words, useless.
The Nigeria Football Federation gets 85% of its budgets funded by the Federal Government of Nigerian ( that explains the government’s large entourage at any of the national team’s events) but who funds or supports the funding of the state FAs?
How then can an entity in Nigeria without funds or political support blossom as expected?
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