On weekends in Nigeria, getting together to watch the English Premier Leaguefeatures on almost everyone’s to-do list.
Bars and restaurants draw significant crowds to screenings of live games, and at least four pages of most newspapers are dedicated to the Premiership – with the local league relegated to what little space is left. On social media you’d be forgiven for thinking Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal are Nigerian teams, such is the volume discussion and dissection after each game.
The country is football-mad, yet the local Premier League is sorely neglected. The Nigerian Football Federation is seen as corrupt and ineffective, and there is little interest in homegrown footballing contests. Attendance at league matches averages about 200 people, with stadiums left tellingly empty.
Things are so bad that Lagos and Abuja, the biggest cities, have no teams in the Nigerian league at all.
But in a bid to redress the balance, football fan Efeoghene Ori-Jesu has taken it upon himself to create a semi-professional league with the few resources available to him – his friends and his 4,000 Twitter followers.
In May last year, Ori-Jesu set up his own tournament, choosing a local AstroTurf pitch in Lagos as the venue. Four teams were formed from his Twitter followers and other users of the social network – a mix of rank amateurs and semi-professionals. With virtually no budget, talk of the new league spread across Nigerian cyberspace and locally, via word of mouth.
All of Ori-Jesu’s teams were named in homage to the most popular Premier League clubs: the Red Devils for Manchester United, the Blues for Chelsea, the Guns for Arsenal – and the Rebels for all the others.
“The Twitter Premier League [TPL] started with a challenge to all the coaches and pundits on the English Premier League on Naija [Nigerian] Twitter,” explains Ori-Jesu, who also works as a petroleum engineer outside Lagos. “We said ‘Hey, if you think you know so much about football, why not put your passion to work in an actual football league here in Nigeria?’”
The first match, held on 29 May last year, drew a crowd of more than 500 people – and the number has steadily increased at each game since. Since last year, there have been four TPL “seasons”, and with each the league has become the number one trending topic in Nigeria on Twitter.
GUARDIAN(UK)
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