How To Run A Football Club Profitably

•Club Owner, KUNLE SONAME Reveals Strategies

Chief Kunle Soname is a Sport enthusiast. He is the owner & Chairman of Remo Stars FC, a professional Division one club side, the first Nigerian to acquire a European  club, a Portugese LigaPro side, Clube Desportivo Feirense which he brought in 2015.

A few weeks back, he was Segun Odegbami's guest on his radio programme. Below are excerpts of the interview.

Kindly assess club ownership in Nigeria.

To be honest with you, we have a bit of a way to go. Funding is key. I mean of course we did the same with that team we met in the first round. They played here the first leg and we also told them, my friend, instead of us going to Comoros you can remain here. We would pay for your hotels, we would pay for your feeding, we pay for everything, you don’t need to pay for the the ground. And they agreed. And we played both legs here. Of course that was even worse because they didn’t have any any ground in their country that was approved then for the game."

"So they would still have taken us to South Africa so it was cheaper for the South Africans. My friend, let’s play both legs here we’ll host you, we’ll pay. Of course we need to pay the Referees indemnities you know and and all the rest of that. We paid the referees tickets, you know it’s not easy playing on the continent, you know that’s without subvention or without help from Government, from anywhere.

The point I would just want to point out is fans can’t identify players in the league. There are no star players in the league who can carry the league that we can follow.

Any star player this season is out of the league next season. He’s going to maybe Tanzania, Zambia, Bangladesh. So that is difficult. You see, the guy said he doesn’t even know any player and that’s why I said it is more than putting the game on TV. This is more than that. I mean people need to know these people, then it means who you know is who you will follow. I mean if the turnout rates of good players is very high, once they have a very good season, they are out by next season.

So it boils down to not enough money in the league. We don’t pay these players enough, that is the problem, we don’t pay enough.

 The average wage of a Nigerian player is 600K, 700 000 naira and of course people will say 700 000 naira is a lot of money now but no because a footballer’s career is short, he cannot play this game after 40 years.

So he needs to save up for when he gets old so he must make all the money he can whilst he’s still active. That’s the problem, so by and large for me, there must be a way to attract more money into the league. Once that comes into the league, imagine each club gets 500 million naira from the league, that means the league requires 10 billion naira right? They’ll be able to pay a bit more because they have their own money as well. I mean rather than getting 10 000 so you got 500 million. I mean the least club in Epl they get hundreds of millions of dollars, euros and pounds.

They are able to pay properly, pay wages, upgrade their stadiums properly and like I keep saying, football is entertainment, it is basically entertainment.

So I was asking my colleagues, look, why is it that people are able to go and watch the video of matches and buy a table for five million and they are not able to come to the stadium and pay 50 000 for gate fee? It’s the same entertainment, that means we don’t entertain them enough, they are willing to go and buy the video but not willing to come and watch 22 players.

I read an editorial this morning about Rashidi Yekini. Five years after he stopped playing professionally abroad, he was only playing every Friday football in Ibadan. We brought him to come and play for Gateway Football Club. The first football match he played in gateway that stadium was jam-packed because it was Rashidi Yekini who had retired five years before, just to show you the power of a big name in football the same thing happened with Amed Musa in Kano.

When he came back to play for them the stadium was filled to capacity.

I like the fact that you brought this topic to the table this morning because this topic is the core of Nigerian football. It’s not about the national team, this is the core of Nigerian football after Remo stars  lost to Mamelodi Sundowns I wrote a piece titled Still Flowers For The Remo Stars, a lot of people criticised me and said why did I have to praise the team that lost five one at home. I know the Nigerian champions and I tried to analyse to them that look i’ve gone to research Mamelodi Sundowns the team was founded in the 50s Remo Stars was founded like 21, 24 years ago. I know the story of Remo Stars from then and then to the time they were the nemesis of Gateway United FC in the early 2000s and I said look, these are 2 teams that have different histories and all we can do is to commend and encourage him to continue to do what he’s doing and for us to continue to pray that we have more Nigerians like him who will invest their money and the money of their businesses in football.

It’s clearly not a case of whether we are playing or not or whether we have the talent or not, it’s a question of the competition between naira and other currencies. Naira and dollar, naira and euro, naira and pounds, just like you said the other time, the the lifespan of a footballer is no more than maybe 10 to 15 years and so he wants to make big money now.

He also wants to survive, he has dependants. It’s quite different from your era Big Sheg when you only play football for entertainment and even the money that you earned playing, you were like one of the richest men around in Nigeria then because the money was enough for you to take care of your family to move around, to go clubbing, to chase all the girls.

We need to invest more in such a way that players from other parts of Africa, maybe West Africa, will be willing to come to Nigeria and play for our club sides so that we can compete against big teams. Like in the 80s, we had a real core, we had foreigners who came to play for Abiola Babes and even Shooting Stars.

We had quality players that came to play for them because Naira was stronger than all other currencies in West Africa so our football is also tied to our economy. As long as our economy is still struggling we are likely to continue to struggle with our local football in the long run. It’s just the international football that we would be celebrating.

So, the conclusion for me is that we need to encourage him and we continue to also attract and encourage other people that can put their money in Nigerian football so that our league can grow and become strong and attractive enough for our players to stay back so that we can build a variety of local football system.

There are more viewing centres where people go to watch football matches every week. There are more viewing centres in Nigeria than there are churches and Mosques put together. There are more academies in Nigeria, mushroom academies in every street and you know in every corner there are academies all over the place than there are churches and Mosques put together in Nigeria. Nigerians with their build, they are born for sport. The average Nigeria is born for sport, born to run, born to dribble, born to do those things that other people do not do around the world and that’s the truth in virtually all sports that have to do with speed and strength and power. Why are we not harnessing all of these energies and attributes and endowment?

You have said it all, we are built for sports and that’s even the reason why we are still where we are now, if not it could've been worse. There is abundance of talent here. When this one goes today, another one is coming, when this one goes, another one is coming because we are over 220 million people and we are built for sports. We jump higher, we run faster, we fight harder just the Nigerian never say die, the fibre in our tissue is stronger than the Europeans and that is what is still upholding us now.

But what is most important is to organise ourselves. We need to organise ourselves properly, without organisation nothing is going to work.

Even in the national team, we hear the lamentations of the people that come to play for us.

If you don’t organise yourself properly you’re not going to get the results. That is what we need to do, organise ourselves properly and then of course another layer to that is get people that are knowledgeable and secondly people that have got things to lose if things fail, then, you’ll see that people will work better but when you put people that have got nothing to lose if things fail they will just walk away.

–Interview by Segun Odegbami