Governor Raji Fashola of Lagos State was TOYIN IBITOYE’S guest on Channels sports programme Thursday night.
He spoke on Nigerian sports and how to improve our football. Lagos is the host of the Challenge Cup final that comes up tomorrow at the Teslim Balogun Stadium. He spoke on it but started with Eagles crash from the Nations Cup.
He attributed the plunge in sports to the state of the nation and said that it was a global trend that when a country is doing well economically it robs off on all aspects including sports. We reproduce his comments:
Lately, if you look at Europe, Germany is the dominant economy there and you would see what has happened in their sports. There’s a lot of work to do. By the simple law of probability, if you have 170 million people, you are likely to find natural talents, but what do you do with those talents? What plans are in place to develop the talents?
At the National team level, one thing we have overlooked is the fact that National team football is not the same as club football. You can buy stars into a club, but you can’t buy nationalities, even with the dual nationality and all the flexibility that FIFA has created across board.
The trick to enduring national football is the league. The Italian clubs have not been doing well in Europe over the last decade, but the Italian National team always acquits itself. You won’t kick them out before the quarter finals of any major championship. The British league is the best, but Britain barely goes beyond the quarter finals and the reason is that most of their players are not playing in their top-flight league.
It’s a league dominated by foreigners. Spain has been constantly and lately the team to be, until recently, Brazil and Germany too. When you go back to the time when our national team was really at its best, most of the players then were in the local league and those abroad were playing first-team football, even if it was in small clubs like Victoria Setuba.
When our players make this money-moves to big clubs only to go and warm benches, it is an ominous sign for the national team because there’s only that small window to assemble a team together to practice. At the national team level, you don’t teach ball control, you teach team shape, team discipline, tactics and set pieces. That is why players who play together in the same league every day are usually more adaptable, they form the brain work of the national team.
When you assemble them in three days, you realise that most of them have played together either in the same club or in the same league, where the league philosophy is the same and that’s why you see the Argentines, Brazilians playing in Spain majorly, where the philosophy is essentially same. Most of their defenders play in some of the Italian and European clubs where the defensive philosophy is also the same.
The solution to what happened on Wednesday to Eagles is to go back to the local league. We became defending champions by going with some home-based players, bringing in some experienced players who were playing first-team football. Most of those players now, Mikel and the likes, are not playing first-team football anymore.
Matic has taken Mikel’s position. Someone who plays 15 or 30 minutes every week, suddenly you want him to come and give you 90 minutes command performance. He’s going to burn out. That’s why you saw that Ahmed Musa was easily the most effervescent player we had, because he plays every week in Champions league, local league and even for his club in Moscow, Russia.
These things are not accidental and that’s why the philosophy here in Lagos has been to build from the basics and grassroots. That’s why we are spending money on sports centres, small playgrounds, Ifakojaiye Campus, Agege and a few others like that. We are coming into schools.
We have a partnership with Astroturf where we are putting those football fields on a PPP basis, they’ll maintain them in all our schools.
We’ve done the same thing with boxing, scrabble, tennis, street football, swimming etc. We now have a classic event that runs from the middle of the year till December when it’s capped with the boxing championship. We are beginning to develop a store of talents, but there is work to do as regards developing them.
You talked about focusing on our domestic football. Let’s look at government’s involvement, what should be the role of government in football administration?
What you should say is, Where have those government clubs gone? When the government or governor that loves football leaves, what happens? That is why I’ve refused to put government money into sponsoring a club. This is something I have participated in as a hobby and it is a life passion. I understand that government can’t be the sole driver of sports.
People have asked me why Lagos doesn’t have a club. We have a club, Bridge FC, my friends and I formed a limited liability company, put money together. We run the club and it’s still running in the lower league. They are holding out their own and hopefully we will get it, because we want to build the proper models.
Despite private sponsorship, government has a role to play as regulator through the ministry, but it mustn’t be the operator. We have all the facilities to start a modern and efficient football league if we think properly. Almost all the states where we wanted to host the U-17 World Cup repaired their stadia.
We can make arrangements with all the clubs to lease out these stadia. We already have the centres, how do we get people in? We can play our matches on Sundays after church service. Most of the Italian games are played on Sundays after church service. We have to make those stadia family destinations. We have to change the way we build sporting facilities and stadia because they must be beyond the event. If my wife doesn’t want to watch football, we can have a salon in the stadium. My children may not also want to watch football.
We are still building gradually, there must be efficient transportation that takes everyone to and from there. It’s not just enough to build it, we must integrate it into the family culture, so that when you return from church, you know you’re going to eat lunch in the stadium and whoever wants to make his/her hair can also get that done there. You also know if you’re going to eat dinner with the children, there’s something to buy there.
Then you know everyone is going home to sleep and get ready for work the next day. It has to be a family destination. When you have about 50,000 pairs of eyes in one place, sponsors will follow suite. We need to understand this, so it’s not even one stadium, that stadium must always be green to make it television-friendly. Every club should have three other practice pitches.
In most of the pitches we see on TV, the players don’t train there. I know that Manchester United has ten practice pitches and there’s a pitch manager that dictates when a particular pitch will be used. It’s a very big industry and it consumes everything it produces. Players become groundsmen, broadcasters – sports ambassadors, cadet trainers, scouts, sports journalists.
It takes up everything. Nobody who was once a sportsman should be unemployed when the right policies are in place. We need to look at the legislation, but we need to have a long-term vision. It’s not about going to win the next tournament. Coaching football at senior level is not the same as coaching it at cadet level and also the nutrition issues.
Some of my friends started an academy in my name very early when I became governor and most of kids played with us every Sunday. One day, I told them these kids were not growing and I thought was due to malnutrition.
They played great football but were not growing. We contributed money, took them on tours to South Africa and Europe for exchange programmes. I found out that one of them was about 12, but my son who was then eight was a clear head taller than him.
So, we went to King’s College, booked their hostels for boarding and ran a training programme for them for over three months, the results were amazing. What did we invest in? Oats, Beans, Milk, Fish and Eggs which they couldn’t get from home. We’ve been doing it every year and it has been yielded positive results.
Talking about the Federation Cup, we recently had a guest, 80-year-old Jonathan…. one of the legends that was honoured this year and he was singing your praises, appreciating you for remembering what he did about 56 years ago. Where did you get the idea to honour legends of the game who have been forgotten by many?
It is because they inspired me so much. I used to skive classes to go and watch them play football and I remember players like Sam Dada Okoye, Christian Madu, the list is endless. I still find it funny calling it Federation Cup, it’s Challenge Cup. One of the things I objected to immediately then was, why move the Federation Cup away from its traditional home.
The British have not moved the FA Cup from Wembley except during the period they were constructing. There are some things we shouldn’t just do, that aren’t just right. This is where it was born and as long as the facilities and stadia are there, we should let this things go on. The only opportunity for players in other leagues to play at Wembley is to play in the FA Cup finals. It’s a destination, we don’t dishonour the memory, and that’s why football grounds develop that kind of tradition.
What you see while watching the FA Cup in England is the kick -off of the game, even though the FA Cup starts at mid-day. On that day, all the old players are on parade, they are honoured and celebrated. Before the kick off, they remember all those who have made the competition the institution it has become. It is our own modest way of saying ‘Thank you’. Many of them who are coaches have been engaged by our sports ministries. They are helping to maintain stadia and to train young players. We found something for as many of them as we could. We can’t do these things without looking back. We haven’t celebrated our heroes. If we look for heroes today, we must remember those people. We should be able to document things and tell stories. This inspires and tells the young and present generation that they won’t be forgotten.
You were honoured the ‘Governor of the Year’ at the Nigerian Sports Award, how rewarding is it for you that people are taking note of the investments you are making in grasroots sports development?
As far as awards are concerned, I accept them on behalf of my team. Those men and women in our public service who have agreed to work with me. They deserve the award, not just the team leader alone. The award is in recognition of their efforts and I hope that it inspires them to continue to do more of these things even long after I have left office, which isn’t going to be too long.
How would you want to be remembered , particularly in the minds of sports lovers?
It’s difficult to answer this kind of question. What is important for me is that we’ve built an idea. All of these individual things don’t prosper a nation, but when people rally round an idea, they even forget who brought the idea and work towards making it enduring. It’s the idea that we should build from the grassroots that is most important. The German teams don’t lose in Javelin, discus, athletics etc and that’s the kind of spirit we need. We are looking for champions of today, tomorrow and forever. We don’t go to the field hoping to win by praying, but by preparing and praying that our work will be rewarded.
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