The Chairman of the Nigeria National League (NNL), Mr. George Aluo, has said that his board has kept to their promise of repositioning the country’s second-tier football league by running it professionally.
The veteran sports journalist turned football administrator stated this in an interview with journalists ahead of the ongoing NNL Super 8 championship in Enugu.
Aluo said his administration has brought sanity to NNL, “From my own assessment and report of our independent observers and assessors, I’ll say that the league was well-organised and for the first time, we saw teams winning away matches and picking maximum points on the road which was not the case prior to the coming of the current board of the NNL.
“Shortly after we’re sworn in, I made it clear that the league under my watch will not be business as usual and we kept to that promise. Teams that tried to cut corners were sanctioned and in some cases, fines were imposed on them or they were banished from their home grounds; all these brought sanity to the league. We will continue to work hard and improve the standard of the league,” Aluo said.
According to Aluo, the impressive performance of NNL teams in this year’s President Federation Cup where five of the teams made it to the last eight and two – Kebbi United and El-Kanemi Warriors of Maiduguri are in the semifinals of the competition, was a proof of how transformed and improved the clubs in Nigeria’s second’s football league have become within one season of his led leadership.
“What this shows is that NNL teams are good and the players capable of playing for any of the NPFL teams. It also shows that our league has improved tremendously because if the league is poorly managed, none of the teams would have gone beyond the first or second round before exiting the championship. I’m not only happy that they performed creditably well, but I’m more excited that NNL teams defeated some of the best top flight teams in the country and it’s worth celebrating.
“Having said this, I want to stress that we are highly excited with their performances and I want to assure Nigerians that the most important league in the country will continue to witness more improvement,” Aluo added.
