Since President Muhammadu Buhari approved the 10-year Football Master Plan, many stakeholders have hailed the initiative, which they described as a step in the right direction for the round leather game. Vice Chairman of the Football Master Plan Development Committee, Yemi Idowu, says the master plan would inculcate a new ideology into Nigerian football. Sportsafricana.com writes.
The Football Master Plan Development Committee is one of the many attempts by the current Sports Minister, Sunday Dare, to reform sports administration in Nigeria. The 16-man committee is headed by a former president of the Nigerian football association Alhaji Ibrahim Galadima and includes many respected football stakeholders in Nigeria.
Other members of the committee include former international footballers from different parts of Nigeria like Emmanuel Babayaro, a former super Eagles captain Sunday Oliseh and former Green Eagles legend turned journalist broadcaster Segun Odegbami. The committee also has respected journalists like Ikeddy Isiguzo and Ade Ojeikere whose inclusion brought much-needed balance. The inclusion of Ayo Omidiran, the first female member of the association demonstrated the inclusive intent of the committee.
Vice chairman of the committee is Yemi Idowu, a businessman whose passion for sports cannot be overemphasised. His contribution to football development has been immense through his investments in sports and sporting infrastructure.
A detailed review of the two-volume committee report approved by President Buhari and the subsequent interviews granted by various members of the committee suggest that the 10-year Football master plan is expected to reinvigorate the development of football at the grassroots and beyond.
Idowu said: “One of the things that we agreed is that, let us start enjoying football and let the children play. We need to get the children, the youths back into football and we need people to start liking football. Let us go back to the grassroots, our local leagues and operate them optimally again. Let us have the school competitions working again with inter-school competitions, Principal’s Cup, Academicals.
“When you have states like Anambra versus Yobe, Sokoto versus Imo and things like that, it will encourage people to participate. If you have people who are stars from schools graduating into divisional leagues and then graduating into the national league, you are going to get followership as more and more people are going to come on board,” Idowu added.
He continued: “Norway can go to the World Cup, sometimes they don’t. Finland can go to the European Cup or maybe not. But they enjoy their football. We need to start understanding that we cannot spend 95 percent of our budget on national teams and ignore the entire population of 200 million people. Government released N15 billion for football over seven years. Why are we buying first-class tickets, giving people $10,000 per day and sending people to go on trips with 20 officials and things like that when that same money can be spent on 36 states and let the children play?
“In Lagos state, we have a centre in Ajegunle known as Maracana where we have 19 football pitches. At any point in time, we can accommodate 4,000 children. That is the model that we want to follow.”
Explaining the essence of the committee, Idowu said: “This committee is the latest of many committees we have had on this very topic. But what they have done this time which was never done before was that, a neutral playing ground was provided where all stakeholders were allowed to come and to contribute. The Nigerian Footbal Federation (NFF) was represented by their vice president and the former general secretary of the NFF was a member of the committee.
“As the President said, football is our national sport. It is the one that actually draws most attention and just like sprinting is to Jamaica and long distance running to Kenya. Nigeria has football.
“What we have done in this committee is ask everybody to make a presentation and we made a thematic analysis of what everybody submitted and we looked at the common areas, the areas that were of least resistance where everybody has commonality of interest. The Nigeria Bureau of Statistics provided us with the facts and the metrics which guided the choices we have made.
“At the end of the day, the master plan is in three phases. We have the short-term, medium-term, and long-term phases. And what we drew up is a strategic document. It should give us an architectural drawing of the kind of house we want. You look at the four levels which are strategic, tactical, descriptive and implementation which is sometimes called the operational level.”
Idowu added: “We have completed and concluded the government side of this mission. There is no other document that has gone this far in the history of Nigerian sport. We’ve got to the point where the Federal Government said ‘You go and meet, tell us what you want’ and that’s what we have done. We had contributions from Nigeria National League (NNL), Nigeria Women Football League (NWFL), League Management Committee (LMC), Higher Institutions Football League (HIFL), Youth Sports Federation of Nigeria (YSFON), Nigeria Olympics Committee (NOC) and a host of others making their presentations.
“We met on a neutral basis, and we agreed on areas where there was commonality of interest. We have a structure now where you have NFF which handles international football and over the years instead of us having a bottom-up strategy, we have been having the top-down strategy and the grassroots has been ignored. That was the problem. So, we’ve all agreed that we will go back to revive the base.
“What we are talking about is that we want our school competitions to be active again. We want our U-13, U-15 and U-17 competitions back up again. When all these are functional, we will have products graduating into national and international football.”
Delving further into the details of the master plan and how it will be executed, Idowu said: “NFF is only one of the stakeholders. We have the Nigerian Olympic Committee (NOC) which takes care of the Olympics team. We’ve got the Nigeria School Sport Federation (NSSF) where all our junior teams should come from. One of the things this master plan does is that it gives positions to all the stakeholders. International football would be controlled by the NFF. State FAs will be in charge of the state competitions. Schools will be in charge of the academicals. Everybody has their role in this plan.”