18 October 2007
editorial
NIGERIA football abhors pro-gress, it shuns success and distances itself from things that will enhance its profile. Our football has assumed notoriety for serial crisis which has acquired an unbroken regularity.
Hardly does a year pass without some elements being at each others' throats to disrupt the future of the game. Usually, the issue is their base interests. The rapprochement that follows lasts as long as there are no new interests to foul the air again.
Greed, self-importance and utter ignorance drive the foibles that are at play in our football. The chicanery of the sports media is probably a bigger embarrassment. These factors have combined to consistently unleash convoluted mayhem on our football to the detriment of the game and to the benefit of those who have worked out these crises as their way of profiting from the game.
How can a country that has just won the FIFA U-17 World Cup not be in celebration of its game? What are the issues that have pushed the game to the precipice, just a year after it was presumably rescued from FIFA opprobrium by the same characters who are now at each others' throats?
At the centre of the present crisis is a FIFA Congress last May 31, effective August 1, mandating its affiliates worldwide (in our case the Nigeria Football Association), to take full responsibility for the appointment of referees for all competitions through an independent Referees' Committee. The rule has global application and only in Nigeria, so far, has it become contentious.
Before this order, the Nigeria Football League, NFL, a subsidiary of the Nigeria Football Association, NFA, appointed its own referees under a project it said would sanitise the professional league, which had been characterised by claims of unfair officiating. Many, who are associated with the League commend the efforts of the NFL in improving the professional league.
The best argument that the NFL has for disrupting the game and refusing to submit to the authority of the NFA is that the league will presumably return to the inglorious days of bad officiating.
Nobody knows what makes NFL believe that it is the only body that has great conviction of rescuing football from corruption.
It is a laudable ambition that it cannot achieve alone, and which cannot be an acceptable reason for going contrary to FIFA's directive. Even advanced leagues in Italy and Spain, for example, still come under scrutiny for the shenanigans of referees and officials who attempt to influence them.
The NFL never accepted the decisions. It thought the NFA came by it to deprive the NFL of its powers. In a most unprecedented and indecorous step, the NFL wrote FIFA to ask if it made the decision that was on the FIFA website.
FIFA did and advised the NFL to seek further clarifications on all matters with the NFA, since these were local issues and it was not FIFA's practice to dabble into domestic matters. NFL was not pleased, it wrote again asking who would pay the referees, its move to ensure that the money for the league sponsorship was under its control. FIFA referred it to the NFA.
While the crisis has been promoted as a move to wrest the sponsorship money from the NFL, it is unlikely that the sponsor, which has the money in the vaults of a bank in its group, will pay the money to the NFA, without due process.
The sports media took sides, ignoring the salient point that this was about compliance with the FIFA Congress amendment of Article 13 of its Statutes that deals with referees, directive that affects all its members.
The playing up of personalities and issues of accounting for the league sponsorship money is important, but misses the point that the contest is about compliance with FIFA's standards.
If the officials of the NFL understood this, they would have worked out ways of meeting FIFA's standards and at the same time protecting the league, which is wobbling dangerously with two sets of officials turning up at some match venues.
The sponsor is threatening to withdraw. By now, talks on the renewal of the contract should be on. Who would want to sponsor a league like this? The meddlesomeness of some groups, including the House of Representatives Committee on Sports and some Commissioners of Sports have failed to tell the NFL that it CANNOT run football contrary to FIFA's rules.
NFL officials who are investing in the sustenance of this crisis should be punished, they have over-estimated their powers and exhibited such ignorance that their usefulness to the game is now doubtful.
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