Manage Football As Business

The longstanding issue of unpaid bonuses for players and officials of the Super Eagles again reared its ugly head moments before the crucial match against Gabon in the semifinal playoff for the 2026 World Cup qualification. The team cited a lack of payment of match bonuses. This trend has festered for a long time and calls to question the motive behind the nonpayment of match allowances to these players and officials.

As a newspaper, we are aware that in January 2024, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu earmarked the sum of N12 billion to clear the backlog owed to players and officials of the male and female national teams.

Therefore,  we find it curious as to why the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) increasingly finds it difficult to ensure the timely payment of match bonuses and allowances to players and match officials. Before the recent incident in Morocco, in 2019, during the African Cup of Nations, the Super Eagles, after defeating Burundi, refused to attend a press conference and skipped training before their next group game. As usual, the NFF promised payment and the issue was resolved. In 2014, before their Round of 16 clash with France at the FIFA World Cup, the Super Eagles boycotted training, demanding immediate payment of $30,000 bonuses and a share of FIFA’s $8 million appearance fee. This was also resolved after former president Goodluck Jonathan intervened.

In the 2013 Confederations Cup, after drawing with Namibia in a World Cup qualifier, the team refused to travel to Brazil for the FIFA Confederations Cup. They rejected the NFF’s decision to cut bonuses from $5,000 to $2,500, insisting on full payment and settlement of outstanding allowances. And the list goes on. It must be stated that these incidents have continually caused the country untold embarrassment before the international community.

We believe that the NFF, as the body responsible for football administration in Nigeria, has a budgeting process for footballing engagements in the country and the subsequent financial implications.

We recognize that the bulk of the funding for the NFF comes from government allocation, and as such, there would be occasional delays in the release of funds to implement some of its programmes. However, the NFF also gets additional funding from corporate sponsorships and international grants for football development across the country. It is thus curious to imagine the fate of other activities of the NFF, especially our league and grassroots sports development. It would interest us to know that Nigeria has five leagues (Nigeria Premier Football League, Nigeria National League, Nigeria Women’s Football League, Nationwide League One, and the Nigeria Amateur League). How many know of the existence of these leagues, let alone their viabilities.

It is thus the position of this newspaper that the NFF is lagging in turning the nation’s footballing fortunes around.

We are compelled to highlight   three important actions to be undertaken by the NFF in its quest to turn its fortunes around.  The first task for the NFF is to expand its sources of revenue by looking at football administration as a business and not as a regulator. They can take some lessons from how football clubs are administered, especially in their strategies for generating revenues.

Secondly, the NFF must move from the public service mentality to the private sector mentality. This is important to turn around its fortunes in the sense that the private sector setting is dynamic and brings about ideas on how to run a business and effectively use certain markers and criteria that would inform decision-making. This point is specific to the management of the various leagues. For example, the leagues in England are administered by the Football Association. The English FA is run as a business. In 2024, it raked in £551.2 million in profit and revenues. This is instructive.

Thirdly, government interference should be drastically reduced. For example, in 2014, FIFA suspended Nigeria from international competition after football leaders were fired by the government following the team’s World Cup exit, and the court order from a Federal High Court compelled the then minister of sports to appoint a civil servant to take over the running of the NFF. Though the suspension lasted only nine days after the court order was lifted, it painted a grim picture of the negative impact of government interference in football administration in the country.

We, therefore, argue that the recent embarrassment over unpaid bonuses by the Super Eagles is a reflection of the larger issues in football administration in Nigeria, and the need for reforming football administration in the country cannot be overemphasized.