As the 2025/2026 Nigerian football season draws to a close, respected Stationery Stores FC chairman Adetilewa Adebajo has penned a wide-ranging reflection on the state of the game in Nigeria — tracing its proud origins, dissecting its catastrophic decline, and raising uncomfortable legal questions about the very body that governs it.

Origins of Nigerian football

Nigeria's formal entry into world football was no accident. The process was driven by the Nigerian Olympic movement, led by Sir Justice Adetokunbo Ademola and supported by Israel Adebajo, who together financed the country's FIFA affiliation application. Filed through CAF in 1959 and ratified at the FIFA congress in 1960, that application paved the way for Nigeria's planned participation in the Rome Olympics that same year.

Sir Ademola appointed GKJ Amachree as the first chairman of the indigenous NFA, with Israel Adebajo serving as treasurer. Government interference resulted in both men being removed from their posts, though Amachree returned as chairman after the 1966 coup. Adebajo redirected his energies into building Stationery Stores FC — a club that ultimately produced 10 of the starting players for Nigeria's debut at the 1968 Mexico Olympics, where the Green Eagles held a legendary Brazilian side to a 3-3 draw after trailing. That appearance was the culmination of a decade of effort, following failed qualification bids in 1960 and 1964. Twenty-eight years on, Nigeria claimed football gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, having already announced themselves on the global stage at the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States.

Corruption, interference, and the fall

The picture Adebajo paints of Nigerian football today is bleak. He identifies government interference, corruption, greed, and conflicts of interest among administrators as the primary causes of the sport's decline — not, as is often claimed, competition from European leagues or the rise of digital media.

The Nigeria Premier Football League (NPFL) has suffered most acutely. DSTV invested over $100 million in outside broadcast vans to cover the league and paid previous NPFL managers handsomely for television rights. Yet administrators, working through related marketing companies, reportedly redirected 85 percent of those TV rights revenues away from clubs. The result: two generations of Nigerian Gen Z and Gen X fans who have never set foot in a stadium to watch domestic football.

Match-fixing remains a festering wound. Adebajo describes attending an IICC Shooting Stars match in Ibadan where two clear goals were disallowed and an obvious penalty denied — with the referee, match commissioners, and assessors all suspected of being compromised by clubs with competing interests in the final standings.

The financial arithmetic is damning. Running a club through an NPFL season costs a minimum of 2.5 billion naira, yet winning the league yields a prize of roughly 200 million naira. There are no meaningful television rights payments, no merchandise revenue, no significant gate receipts, and no substantial sponsorship income. Football in Nigeria, Adebajo concludes, is a loss-making venture sustained almost entirely by government-owned clubs and wealthy private patrons.

The global comparison

The contrast with the world's richest leagues is stark. Each English Premier League club is projected to receive between £120 million and £195 million in central broadcast and commercial distributions alone during the 2025/26 season. According to Deloitte's Annual Review of Football Finance, Premier League clubs collectively generated £6.3 billion in revenue in the 2023/24 season, with projections of £6.8 billion for 2025/26. The NFL, for context, generated just over $23 billion in total revenue last season.

Nigeria's absence from the World Cup

Perhaps the starkest indicator of Nigerian football's collapse is the country's failure to qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup — a tournament at which a record 10 African nations will be represented. Nigeria, with their proud pedigree of six World Cup appearances, are not among them. Despite this failure, the entire NFF board and management remain in post.

Adebajo also notes that no Nigerian referee has been selected for AFCON in recent memory, and none have attended a World Cup. For a country that once qualified for major tournaments with ease, he argues, these are not minor setbacks — they are symptoms of systemic collapse.

The legal question hanging over the NFF

Adebajo raises a pointed legal challenge: in January 2012, a Federal High Court in Abuja ordered the disbandment of both the Nigeria Football Federation and the Nigerian Premier League. The older Nigeria Football Association (NFA), created and recognised by statute under Decree Act 101, remains legally intact and continues to receive budgetary allocations from the National Assembly.

In practice, Adebajo argues, administrators operate a dual structure — using the NFF to collect FIFA and CAF funding while drawing on the NFA to access government allocations. The NFF itself, he contends, is an unincorporated association operating on FIFA-style statutes without specific recognition in Nigerian law.

His conclusion is a call for Nigerians who care about the game to confront these realities honestly — and to demand the kind of root-and-branch reform that the sport so desperately needs.