The remarkable ascent of Sporting Lagos, a burgeoning football club, has injected a fresh sense of structure, fan base, branding, and even competition into the Nigerian domestic football landscape. It has left many wondering when Nigerian club football last garnered such attention.
Within a mere two weeks, the club secured promotion to the Nigeria Professional Football League from the second division and also emerged victorious in the inaugural Naija Super 8 tournament. This triumph occurred in front of an enthusiastic crowd at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena, signifying a successful initiation into the top-tier competition.
While Sporting Lagos may initially appear unfamiliar to longtime followers of Nigerian club football, it represents a revival of essential elements such as community involvement, player-fan connections, rivalries, and other aspects that once defined the sport. In an era where these fundamental aspects are waning, the emergence of a private club like Sporting Lagos serves as a refreshing throwback to the past.
Founded just over a year ago by a tech guru, Shola Akinlade, the club came into the fray of Nigerian club football with an intent for community development and social change.
Aside from being a software engineer, Akinlade prides himself as someone who builds platforms for a living, and in a six minutes and 58 seconds video which was used to announce the birth of the club on February 3, 2022, the young entrepreneur passionately explained how the memories of the USA 1994 World Cup and the Atlanta 1996 Olympic Games inspired him to explore opportunities in football, not as a player, but as an owner.
“In every profession, I’ve seen people who just love this sport and just looking for ways to contribute and I’m just like it might be a good idea to create something and bring everyone together. What if we created a football club that all of us can own and support?
“The power of having this club in Lagos is just to unify and inspire our people and also create opportunities in the city for the people. The footballers and everyone in the ecosystem,” he said.
Akinlade is the co-founder and CEO of Paystack, the company that was acquired by Stripe in 2020 for $200m. In just a year, he has proven that he didn’t create the club just because he has the money to throw around, rather, he has also expanded his investment by acquiring a 55% stake in Danish second division club Aarhus Fremad in 2023.
The days of little beginning
What has now become a refined brand of football started at the Teslim Balogun Stadium in Surulere, the first adopted ground of the club in the Nigeria National League. The state of the pitch didn’t do justice to the quality of branding that the club brought into it and the capacity of the stadium itself sank the handful number of fans who barely filled one segment of the stands.
The club surely had a tough start to life in terms of results but a culture had begun among their tiny followers. Luckily for them, their darling team also escaped relegation into the Nationwide League One (NLO One) by just a goal difference after their first campaign in the second tier.
As tough as things were, the few fans who made it to the games in Surulere were unusually treated to premium entertainment as musical artists including Teni and Layton performed on the ground during their matches.
Of course, it didn’t come cheap.
“Sincerely, I never thought in my lifetime that a Nigerian football fan would pay as much as N50,000 to watch a league game, the NNL for that matter. Wow! You’ve to be at Sporting Lagos home games to understand what I’m talking about. It all starts with a walk through the beautiful pavilion walkway into the belly of a stadium filled with happy faces who are sometimes not there for only football but the entertainment provided by top acts in the music industry in Nigeria,” Sporting Lagos chairman, Godwin Enakhena told us.
Enakhena, Offor the thinkermen
Veteran sports journalist, Godwin Enakhena, is not new to the football administration in Nigeria having administered one of Nigeria’s finest private-owned clubs in recent times, MFM FC.
Interestingly, Enakhena has now overseen the promotion of two different teams from the second division to the NPFL – MFM in 2014 and Sporting Lagos in 2023. With about a decade of service already put into administration, Enakhena’s credentials are good enough to earn him the position of chairman at the new club.
For someone who ran a club in the heart of Lagos and enjoyed success as huge as bringing continental football and not just the NPFL back to the city, he is a round peg in a round hole as the new club tries to capture the hearts of more Lagosians after the relegation of MFM.
While Enakhena holds a popular place among sports fans, the coach of the team Paul Offor will need a background check to be sure if he could carry the weight of the brand.
With his unassuming look, the former Warri Wolves assistant coach is another reflection and testament to the club’s huge investment in personnel. Offor was appointed before the start of the last NNL season in March, joining from Cotonou-based Premier League club, Djeffa FC.
After four months in charge, Offor successfully led the team to promotion to the NPFL before winning the off-season Naija Super 8 tournament, which they entered as a wildcard.
“It feels good that you set objectives at the beginning of the season and you achieve them. And the most important thing is the structure of the club. Sporting Lagos is very intentional about growth,” Offor told our correspondent.
