Chairman of the League Management Company (LMC) Shehu Dikko says the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) is akin to an oil well with immense potential of yielding enormous financial benefits to investors, clubs and stakeholders.
And just as an oil well requires work to be developed for commercial purposes, Dikko said the NPFL also requires plenty effort to realise its rich potential.
The LMC recently signed a 5-year investment and commercial partnership with Redstrike Sports on behalf of the NPFL, which Dikko described as a ‘groundbreaking’ deal.
In a recent interview on Kennis FM, Dikko, who is also the second vice president of the Nigeria Football Federation, said the league organisers are working hard to ensure more investments come to the NPFL.
“As we have it, everybody have seen this thing (Redstrike partnership) has just come in, but it doesn’t happen overnight,” he said.
“The work was underground for quite some time. That’s why we call it groundbreaking because these are people that are established globally, and they come in and say ‘look, there’s gold in this Nigerian football’. It needs somebody to put the right money, put the right expertise and explore.
“It’s like an oil well. They can give you certificate today say ‘you have an oil bloc’, you just go there you see land. The oil is down, down, down under. You need to go and find huge investment and huge technical capacity to be able to dig that oil well and go to the right level, then, you can be able to extract the oil.”
