Following the recent shake-up in the leadership of football in Nigeria, I took it upon myself to study the Statutes of the Nigeria Football Federation again, this time the March 2026 edition, a document I’ve long argued needs to be rewritten, not just amended.
Before I go further, I want to thank Alhaji Ibrahim Gusau and Dr Mohammed Sanusi for their service. The former president led the delegation on my first international trip with the national team and, directly or through proxy, served as a guardian of the game on numerous occasions. I was a member of NFF Congress under Dr Sanusi, who was also gracious enough to sign off the approval of my national youth service placement at the federation. Football in Nigeria may have declined further under their stewardship, but they are not entirely to blame for it.
Now, to the point. The problems have already been identified, and people far more experienced and knowledgeable than me have proposed solutions. What I want to lay out here is why successive administrations have failed, and what any real reform, whether the statutes are kept, amended, or rewritten must include.
What Is the NFF Actually For?
Article 2(a) of the Statutes is clear about this: the federation exists “to improve the game of football constantly and promote, regulate and control it throughout the territory of Nigeria in the light of fair play and its unifying, educational, cultural and humanitarian values, particularly through youth and development programmes.”
So let’s look at what’s working, starting from home. The recent success of Shooting Stars of Ibadan and Enugu Rangers International (Government-owned) is directly tied to deliberate investment “to improve and promote the game” bringing in qualified people to run things properly.
People respond to results and to football’s visible impact on society. I’ve personally benefited from Rangers International’s capacity-building efforts, and with both clubs, you can see how deeply that culture runs through everything they do. It’s well documented how they’ve rallied their communities around a shared purpose. And the return on that? Success, on and off the pitch.
The second half of that article speaks to youth and development programmes, and the most successful teams in the game today are living proof of what that investment produces. After years of struggle following their success in the 2010s, Spain built a team from its youth system and won a major tournament with a squad whose average age was 26.19, the sixth-youngest at the tournament (Al Jazeera).
A 2025 study tracking 98 elite players across 5,203 match performances (using Catapult VECTOR7 tracking data) found that peak speed occurs around age 25.7, peak explosive actions around 26, and peak endurance around 24.8.
Being young alone guarantees nothing. What matters is how much high-level exposure a player accumulates by the time they hit that peak age. The best players in our men’s and women’s national teams today are the ones who cut their teeth in global age-grade competitions, competitions we now struggle to even qualify for.
Thank goodness coaching licensing is finally being brought back to Nigeria. For far too long, our coaches have been left behind, intellectually stranded, because the chance to advance their knowledge was simply not accessible. To this day, no country has ever won a World Cup with a foreign manager.
And thank God, too, for the football academies that are coaching properly. I’ve watched professional players marvel at training programmes that academy talents find completely routine. I do not blame the pros nobody trained them that way.
My time in grassroots football is well documented, and it’s still a common sight: coaches hurling insults and curses at semi-pro and amateur players instead of giving them tactical instruction or encouragement. They simply don’t know any better. For too long, we’ve gone to league matches hoping only to see our team win not to see a tactical identity we can be proud of.
The Money Question
Article 2(n) says the federation must ” raise revenue through active marketing, sponsorship, and merchandising.” In fairness to the former board, plenty of people argued the government shouldn’t interfere in the NFF’s affairs and Article 5 backs them up. And yet the government keeps contributing significant resources to the federation. Until Alhaji Gusau’s press conference, the details of the national teams’ kit sponsorship were kept in the dark. To this day, the full scope of some of the NFF’s most celebrated sponsorship deals remains unclear, even as debts owed to coaches and players kept growing, until, once again, the government had to step in.
Football is capital-intensive. It is also, when run properly, money-spinning and financially productive. Globally, football is far more than a sport, it’s woven into everyday culture, cutting across age groups, education levels, and geography. Recent data suggests 80–100 million people in Nigeria watch football. Despite the fans’ frustrations and criticism, national team followership sits at 92%, according to Football 2026 Fan Behaviour, Media Consumption & Tournament Predictions (Newton Adika, 2026). Nigeria wasn’t even at the 2026 World Cup and yet Nigerian fans were among the biggest participants in SuperSport’s digital World Cup 2026 experience, accounting for 21.2% of users on the broadcaster’s SuperSport Predictor, the second-highest of any country.
We should be capitalising on that. The federation should be positioning itself to attract brands, broadcasters, advertisers, and content creators looking for mass audience engagement and genuine consumer connection.
Some of the groundwork has already been done for us we just need to leverage it. Brila Media’s Nigeria’s Sports Marketing Intelligence Report 2025 is a good example.
The strategy from here should be converting these audiences into participants, commentators, predictors, creators, and distributors of the football conversation.
This is the mandate the NFF was built on. It’s time we made it the core of the Football reform.
-Pelumi Abiara
