The Group Managing Director of Complete Communications Limited, publishers of Complete Sports Newspaper, Dr. Mumini Alao has said that all hands must be on desk to salvage the Nigeria domestic league from its present state.
Dr. Alao stated this on Monday during a sport program named sports zone on 91.3FM in Lagos, while giving answers based on the backdrop of the choice of the interim super eagles’ coach Austin Eguavoen to include homebased players in the forthcoming African Cup of Nation in 2022 hosted by Cameroon, stressing that the quality of the league affects the performance of the homebased players.
“What is the standard of the local league compared to the standard of the foreign league so. It is the standard of your league that determine the quality of your players, so when have a lot of limitations already which we all know of, I don’t need repeat any of them; infrastructure, poor officiating and so on and so forth.” He said.
On the dominance of foreign based players in the super eagles, the trojan of sports writing profession in Nigeria stated that the foreign based players have been exposed to other climes where their football leagues are top notch and properly run, giving little chance for homebased players who ply their trade where infrastructures are begging for improvement.
“These home based players, they can’t compete on the same level with the foreign based players, that is the fact, even if Eguavoen has the time is only a few of them that will be able to make the grade at the end of the day, like we see in Stephen Keshi when he came, he gave enough so such time opportunities, won the nation cup in south Africa, by the time we got to the world cup two years later in south Africa there was not a single home based player in the national team.
“I spoke with Amodu when he was alive, I spoke with Keshi at length when he was alive, Eguavoen Samson Siasia, they say when you teach the home-based players something, in a short while they forget and that for them is a big problem. So, as I said I am not putting this blame on the home-based players because the foreign based players were home-based players so is when they got out there they got a better facility, better coaching and soon and they became better.
“So, we need to do a lot of work on the domestic league. And when I say we, I mean all of us in the media, fans, the administrators, referees, the players themselves and coaches everybody we have a lot of work today because those we are competing with.” He said.
Giving statistical insight to why there is low viewership and followership to Nigeria’s domestic league, the complete sports boss who wrote his thesis titled ‘Audience influence on media coverage of domestic and foreign football in Nigeria’ during his academic voyage before he bagged his doctorate degree averred that local fans prefer to watch foreign players.
Based on this, he lamented that this has caused capital flight in the Nigeria football market, saying that patriotism is only of the solution to improve the standard of the Nigeria’s domestic leagues.
“The local fans prefer the foreign based player more and I know that from experience because we publish complete sports newspaper and we had some publications that were devoted to local football at time and suddenly the sales started going down because fans more or less lost interest and if you look at the standard to, you don’t blame the local players, you blame the local league.
“What prompted my title was I was challenge at a conference that look that those of in the media we are not doing enough to project domestic football and those who challenged me gave example of what is going on in the entertain and music that Nigeria musicians and Nollywood are doing so well now and I told them that whereas you can domestic Nigeria music, film. You can do your film in Yoruba language, Hausa, pidgin. You can’t domesticate Nigeria football, it is an international property. The way they football in Europe, in America, in Asia, that is the same way you have to play in Nigeria, you can’t play football in pidgin. You can run the commentaries in pidgin that is from the media angle but the rules are the same. And fans don’t just watch football, they watch the superstars. So, who are the superstars in Nigeria league? When we have one or two of them, the next flight, they are in Europe.
“You can see the depth of the problem, we have a big challenge in our hands and our competitors because they are taking our bread away. I am talking about the foreign league, they are taking our bread because we including myself the media are all guilty. We need to bring in patriotism that say look this our league we want to watch it, we want to report it, we want to sponsor it.” He said.