After almost five postponements, the Nigerian league starts this weekend with Kandua United and Kano Pillars slugging it out at the Ahmadu Bello Stadium in Kdauna.

Crisis at all fronts in Nigeria football prevented the League from starting. First there was the leadership tussle between Davidson Owumi and Victor Baribote and then the Court ruling, which stopped the August 26 elections into the board of Nigeria Football Federation.

However, the coast is clear for a take off, but there are so many other unresolved issues waiting to be addressed, otherwise the league will only end up as a charade.

The NPL will kick off this weekend without a title sponsor. The immediate consequence of this is that the league has lost an annual income of about 65 million US dollars.

This is a massive blow in the NPL’s quest to be independent of the NFF, while the wider fallout is that the league will now revert to the practise of old where clubs pay match officials their indemnities.
The issue of broadcast sponsorship also has to be addressed particularly as the NPL have so far received peanuts from the agents in this respect.

In the modern era, football has thrived on television money and experts are unanimous in saying incomes from the sale of TV rights ought to net the NPL far more than they would get from title sponsorship.

All the clubs bar newly-promoted Bukola Babes are owned by government, even Bukola are in the process of being acquired by Kwara State government.

These clubs boast of yearly budgets of as much as 300 million naira (over $2 million), yet players’ meagre salaries, which could range from $100 to $500, are not regular, not to mention match bonuses, sign-on fees and other entitlements.