ODEGBAMI: An excursion into the Nigerian Premier Football league! 

The 2025/2026 Nigerian Professional Football League season rounds off May 24, 2026. It would have been this weekend but postponed to allow Federation Cup matches hold.

However, it’s been 36 years since the mission to lift Nigerian football was embarked upon from where it was for 30 years after Independence. 

It was in 1990 that professional football started in Nigeria. It was domiciled by the decree that set it up in the Nigerian Football Association but was run by a semi-independent body called the Nigerian Professional Football League. Its original mission was to take Nigerian football to the highest levels in global football. 

On May 12, 1990, President Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida signed into law the decree to kick-start professional football in Nigeria. The dream was that in 7 to 10 years, most of the clubs in the professional league (at least) would be privately owned; the clubs would have their own stadia; administrators would be highly qualified technocrats with solid background in business; the domestic league would be competing for LIVE audiences with European football on TV; standard of play would be the best in Africa; corruption and hooliganism would be a thing of the past; Nigerian referees would be some of the best in the continent; the players would earn wages that would not make them swarm ‘abroad’ to even Benin Republic chasing a professional career;  the league would sustain production of players good enough for the national teams; each club would be running its football properties as a business, with many trading on the stock exchange market; the stadia all around the country would be filled with fans following and patronising their clubs; and so on! 

 In 1990, those were not far-fetched targets. The indicators were everywhere. In 4 years, riding on the hope of massive changes and still fueled by previous achievements in the country’s football, Nigerian players started to attract massive interest by European clubs; migration of players to Europe began; the domestic league continued to throw up succeeding generation of players in Etim Esin, Mutiu Adepoju, Victor Ikpeba, Daniel Amokachi, and so on, all world class youngsters that got to the AFCON finals in 1990, won a global trophy in Japan in 1993, won AFCON in Tunisia in 1994, went to the World Cup in 1994 where they took the world by storm and lifted the country to fifth place on the global FIFA ranking. 

Those were the early days of the professional league that was still riding on the back of a very successful amateur league in Nigeria that produced some of the biggest clubs in Africa – Rangers International, Raccah Rovers, Mighty Jets FC, Bendel Insurance FC, IICC Shooting Stars, Leventis United, Abiola Babes and so on. These were all amateur clubs. 

At the birth of the professional football in Nigeria, in the first few years, there was a scramble amongst multinationals for sponsorship of the envisioned League.  Nigerian footballers were world class commodities. 

Expectations remained high until it became obvious that the level of administration did not meet expectations, and did not match the quality of players being churned out even at that time by an amateur league that was on an upward trajectory from 1960. 

Up till the early 1990s local clubs filled stadia all over the country with spectators; some clubs were getting to the final rounds, and were even winning some African club championships; some states had stadia that hosted famous foreign clubs from Europe and South America on a regular annual basis; Grade A international matches were being played in stadia in Ibadan, Calabar, Kaduna and Lagos, at least. 

Every passing year into the 1990s was accompanied by a high turnover of personnel with the premature exit of experienced administrators for political reasons. Successors were ‘weak’ on the original vision of ‘the road to travel’. By the end of the 1990s the plane of development was still revving idly on the tarmac. It has not been able to lift off till now, 26 years later. 

Well, the journey from 1990 to date needs to be properly documented and studied as a model to scholars of football on how NOT to run a professional football league. 

Thats where we are in 2026. 

Unfortunately, the report card of the current professional football league is not sterling. Only a few beneficiaries from its failures would conclude otherwise. 

The League has become a financial nightmare for all those trying to make it work and become profitable and attractive for any investors. A few stakeholders are still hanging in there in hope of a ‘miracle’ to happen. The present administrators are working hard, struggling to unknot the damage of three decades, meandering through a maze of challenges that have no solutions. 

There is an air of helplessness and hopelessness around the Nigerian Professional Football league. 

It needs more than just passion and hope. 

The advert on its bill board tells a sad story. 

Since professional football was established in Nigeria some 36 years ago, there is not a single club in the country that has declared financial success in its operations. 

Owner of, probably, the best-run professional club in Nigeria today, Remo Stars FC of Ikenne, told me in a private conversation how winning the Professional football league is no longer an incentive to participate in the league anymore. The prize for winning the league cannot fund a single continental club match. The league is ‘dangerous’ for teams that have to traverse the country to distant places by road to honour matches with the maximum insecurity situation in the country. The stadia, except in one or two places, are hardly ever full. Most teams do not own stadia of their own. Most of the teams are still government teams without an iota of business in their structure and operations. Players’ wages are some of the lowest in the world. The clubs cannot produce a single player good enough for the national team in recent years. No foreign clubs can play on any turf in the whole country. 

There is not even a single sponsor for the league, not to talk of a scramble. 

I should stop my own lamentation here of a professional football league that is on life-support! 

A very brief history. 

I was a member of the Implementation Committee of Professional football in Nigeria in 1990. 

It started as an independent body set up by the Ministry of Youth and Sports under Minister of Sports, Emeka Omeruah, in 1986. The NFA refused to recognize the ‘independent body’ called The Professional Football Federation of Nigeria (PFFN). 

When Emma Omeruah was replaced by Bayo Lawal, it took 3 years of tweaking with the documents before he inaugurated a Professional Football Implementation Committee headed by Nathaniel Idowu to sort out the differences with the NFA and to kick start professional football in Nigeria.  

The commencement date was altered a few times in 1989 to enable the guidelines for starting the league to be sorted. It suffered another temporary set back when Bayo Lawal was replaced as Minister by Graham Douglas who did not know much about football and was not excited about the matter. 

Nathaniel Idowu, however, single-handedly funded the final documentation by arranging a trip to London by a small team made up of John Ojidoh of Bendel State FA, POC Achebe of Rangers and the NFA, and Remi Asuni of Oyo State FA. 

It was their work that culminated into the first guidelines that heralded the start of Nigerian Professional football League. The league was still considering how many teams to register based on responses to the guidelines when Graham Douglas was also replaced by Anthony Ikhazaboh as Minister of Sports. 

He got the President, IBB, to sign off the final decree that birthed professional football in Nigeria. A full council meeting of the NFA followed in December 1989 where the entire project was ratified. 14 clubs were initially to start the league. Some lobbying went on behind closed doors and finally 16 clubs were admitted to start the professional league. 

8 of them are still in the present set up!

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