.Promises to introduce VAR in 2024 edition
.Says if you focus on money, you will fail
Jenkins Alumona is the CEO of Flykite Productions, organisers of the Naija Super 8 tournament, a pre-season football competition that debuted at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena, Onikan between July 7 and 16.
In this interview with JOHN EGBOKHAN, Alumona opens up on what it took to stage the tournament, which was aimed at bringing back Nigerian fans to the stadiums to watch games of the domestic league. Read on.
Naija Super 8 has come and gone but the memories are still fresh. How did you manage to pull it off. Did you draw from your experience of organizing the Gotv Boxing Night?
The proper way to approach it is that it is not me. I led a team. Its about having the right resources and partnering with the right people and companies. The team I worked with had a mindset to achieve set targets and followed that plan because if you do not have a plan, it is impossible to achieve anything worth celebrating.
When we came up with this plan, based on discussions with our chairman, who said you guys have done well with boxing and you can do it with other sports. He told us why not try football and get fans back into the stadium. It was then that we set about designing the Naija Super 8. Don’t forget that fans are central to this sports. The fans determined it all. They determined the teams who participated. They also determined who won the player of the match award. The fact that there was a good tournament was based on the fans.
In activation, we needed to depend on the right partners like Multichoice. The idea was good but the partners were right. We also needed football administration to support the initiative. I don’t want to talk about the hiccups but we were able to lean on the support of the current NFF board led by its President Ibrahim Gusau, who remarked that it was a good plan but they helped us sort out the errors we made with club liaison. They gave us their backing.
When we went to look for sponsors, If we did not have the MTN, Hero lager beer, MoniePoint, Pepsi, Custodian Insurance, we would still not have had a good tournament.
How were you able to pull these big sponsors into the Naija Super 8 given the talk that sponsors don’t have money for sports.
It is about having a good design and getting people to believe in what you want to do.
So it is about trust and integrity
Maybe, because we had a partner like Multichoice, so it was easier to get some of these other companies. The others trusted us because they had done stuffs with us in the past, as we are in the business of building platforms. We have started building the Naija Super 8 platform, which I would score 70 percent. We are happy with how we started/ Those who score us higher are doing so because they don’t see what we see. We would probably get to 80 percent next year but right now, my score is around 72 percent to 75 percent.
Was there at any point in the course of planning and execution of the Naija Super 8 that you feared you might not achieve the set goals or was afraid of failing.
The only reason why people succeed is because they are afraid of failure. That is my own personal philosophy. If you are not afraid of failure, you will fail. At many points, I was afraid of failure which was why we had to go the extra mile to mitigate the things that might make us to fail, as early as possible. We had created a lot of engagement with the fans and as we went, the fears diminished because we are a marketing company and we definitely have capacity over several likely factors to make a success out of something like this. So if we used our digital marketing company to test something by going out there to talk to fans at different levels, to gauge their expectations, sometimes, you are not sure, but if you keep testing, at every stage, there is a chance that you will succeed.
This was about the fans and we trust the capacity of Nigerian football. If a lot of people didn’t trust, we do. We trusted that we had good footballers, we trusted that we had good coaches, we trusted that we had good administrators and we also trusted that we had good referees.
Sometimes, you would now have to find a way of making all of them work together all the time. If you say that a referee is bad, it is not all the time.
But the referee of the final match between Remo Stars and Sporting Lagos almost messed up the game with a wrong call in the closing stages.
Wrong calls are made everywhere in football, including in the final of a World Cup game. Did the referee make a wrong call? Maybe. Did he do it intentionally, I am sure he didn’t. It is human. It is football. What we have done this year is to give the referees extra ear pieces and next year, with the right sponsorship and partnership, we hope to introduce VAR into the picture. We would eliminate the wrong calls gradually. It would not happen in one day.
All the experts said he did make a wrong call. Let us not forget that in the heat of the moment, it is easy to make all these allegations. We do not have the reputation of manipulating or fixing games. As a person, those who know me, know that I would rather die than manipulate something like that. The idea is against my ideal. That itself is the reason why it took us three years to come to think of putting this tournament out. It took us four years. I write everything on paper. It was written pre-covid. I understand why some people think that it is okay to manipulate but my take is that once you start manipulation, then you will never end manipulation.
We watched the game just like everybody else. All we did was create the environment for everybody to do their best.
It is being said out there that Flykite Productions has set a template for the organization of the Nigerian Premier League as Nigerians have never seen football this way. How do you respond to being called the catalyst for football reawakening?
No it is unfair to say that. It is easy to take the glory for things like these but I daresay that yes we did our best, but that does not take away from the works that people have done and are doing. This season that just ended, a lot went well and people started trusting football again, that a team can go the entire season without losing. All of that were catalysts, the baby steps for what we finally saw at the Naija Super 8. We did a lot of planning, a lot of work and we are happy with what we had on the final day. That day was a culmination of the great work put in by different groups and people.
It is what every game should look like, not just for the league, but every game of football. What we have just done is add some salt to the football. With what we have done, the trust level has increased. Last season was better than the previous seasons and I believe next season, the league will be better. The people who are in charge of the league have been working towards achieving great things for our football. What we have just done is maybe add some salt to a beautiful soup that has been on the fire for some time. The fans trust more now. What we did was bring up their trust.
The mistake people make is that they expect the organisers to bring fans to the stadium. What they do is create the atmosphere and environment for people to come. I think the clubs need to do a little more. Some clubs are but others must step up their efforts in that direction.
Is it Honourable Gbenga Elegbeleye who will go to the homes of fans to bring them to the stadium? I think what they should do is to create the trust that if you play well, you will win. I believe we are on the right path.
Which teams impressed you the most in the Naija Super 8
In terms of building a strong relationship with the fans, I will say Remo Stars and Sporting Lagos. Maybe, because the final was played in Lagos and both clubs are within this area. But Katsina United came with a lot of fans. We gave incentives for them to bring their fans to the stadium. The idea of this competition was to get the fans back into the stadium. I remember when I went to do some work in Ado Ekiti about six years ago and in the afternoon, I went to see a game in the stadium, I was shocked because there were barely 100 people there and the football was not half as bad. I asked people I met why the fans were not there and they said it is not the top division and all they played for was to get promoted. I said how would the players play beautiful football when nobody was there cheering them?
People are talking about the beautiful game between Remo Stars and Sporting Lagos but these guys were being pushed by a capacity filled stadium who were standing, not minding their seats, who got involved by cheering on the players to perform. The crowd is important, you can’t play well without crowd support. I have seen some big games in my life and the crowd played their part in those games.
When the Super Eagles played Italy in the second round of the 1994 World Cup in the USA, the atmosphere in the stadium was electric. The Italian fans were screaming their heads out. The Nigerians there were also filled with emotions. It was so tense. We knew that the fans were pushing for the football to be good. I was also in the stadium when the Super Eagles faced Tunisia at the Nations Cup. The energy was so intense and that is what you see in European football and that is what we are doing and believe will take our football to what it used to be.
What new benchmarks are you going to be setting for the next Naija Super 8 tournament.
We just came out of a meeting and the focus is the next edition, which is 10 months away, hopefully. But we know that whatever we achieved this year, we need to achieve twice as much next year. Be it to the fans, be it with the clubs, the quality of the apparels that the clubs wear/ We look at the very small things. The referees. The scoreboard, substitutes benches, we tried to make things better. We fined clubs for refusing to exchange jerseys with the fans because we believe that it is about the fans and we provided for at least extra jerseys so fans can have these jerseys of the teams, especially the teams they support..
You also fined a coach for inciting his players to walk off the pitch in the final match. What was that about, was it to send a strong statement or what.
It was a heat of the moment reaction by the coach and we ought to make a statement out of it. We need to do things right. Things are not right because five percent think you are doing the right thing. Things are right because a hundred percent think you are doing the right thing. For Flykite, our pass mark is 80 percent. We don’t do 70 percent and that is why I am not so excited. We want to consolidate on what we have started. We are moving very fast with boxing. In football, we started fairly well. This is commendable because things were not so good. We will get to the point when in five years, if we do this kind of quality, I would not be part of it. If we do it like this in five years, it will be a complete failure. In five years, we should be doing 60,000 stadium capacity arenas, with wild card teams from UK and Germany and filling the stadium with 60, 000 fans, being entertained by international acts like Shakira, Burna Boy and Davido, no disrespect to the ones who played in the Naija Super 8. We need more international acts. But because of where we were this is fair. It is a lie that when you want to build something new, that you would be looking in one direction and that is what we have tried to do.
It takes a lot of money to do what you did.
The more we focus on money, the more we lose sight of the essence of what good planning and good partnership bring. Some of the things you saw were not about money. Yes, money is important but if you focus on money, you will fail. You must focus on good relationships, good partnership, good organisation and good people. We worked with people who don’t work within our organisation and they did well. Referees had training sessions almost on a daily basis in order to raise their game. Those ten days were like endless months. It will take more money and more hard work to do next year’s Naija Super 8.
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