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Outcome of club owners’ meeting with NFF boss is ‘self indicting’ says former secretary Sani Toro

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Sani Toro, former General Secretary, Nigeria Football Association

The former General Secretary of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), Sani Toro has frowned at the outcome of the Monday meeting the club owners had with the NFF boss, Ibrahim Musa Gusau.

In the communique released by the NFF after the meeting, a gory picture of the Nigerian football league was painted.

Among other issues, the league was described as lacking in match integrity leading to matches being won on the basis of highest bidder.

Taking the communique point by point, Toro, who was the pioneer secretary of the professional league at its infancy in 1990 remarked that the outcome of the meeting was “serious indictment on the part of previous NFF, LMC, the clubs, the club owners and the Nigeria Referees Association (NRA).”

The communique in item 2 reads:

The Club Owners collectively maintained that the NPFL has suffered serious problems in the past six years and identified the following areas:

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a) Lack of Sponsorship

b) No TV Broadcast

c) Poor Officiating

d) Insufficient Funding

d) Lack of Match Integrity

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e) Poor remuneration of match officials and huge indebtedness in this area

f) Matches won on the basis of Highest Bidder

g) Poor Infrastructure

h) Incompetent Administrators

i) No prize money for winners and/or failure to honour same, et cetera”

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According to Sani Toro, the aforementioned are serious indictments.

Another item he noted was the one in which the club owners appealed to the NFF president to inaugurate the present Interim Management Committee for a short tenure.

To him, that will amount to a conflict since the minister had already  inaugurated the IMC.

He is of the opinion that the NFF in conjunction with the clubs should jointly agree on the modalities of election of an independent Professional League Management Board whose Chairman automatically becomes 2nd NFF Vice President.

“This should be done on or before December, 2022”, Sani Toro, a former House of Representative member remarked.

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Kunle Solaja is the author of landmark books on sports and journalism as well as being a multiple award-winning journalist and editor of long standing. He is easily Nigeria’s foremost soccer diarist and Africa's most capped FIFA World Cup journalist, having attended all FIFA World Cup finals from Italia ’90 to Qatar 2022. He was honoured at the Qatar 2022 World Cup by FIFA and AIPS.

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