SCORENigeria has learnt that the main agenda at Tuesday’s NFF Annual General Assembly (AGA) in Benin City is to finally legitimise the League Management Company (LMC), a private company which organises the country’s top league and which has spectacularly squandered millions of dollars from sponsorships in the past few years.
“The League Management Company (LMC) is not known to the statutes of the NFF, which governs the way football is run in Nigeria,” a top official told SCORENigeria
“What is known is the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) and so the congress will now amend the statutes accordingly.”
The LMC was meant to be a temporary contraption to organise the premier league.
In other countries, including the Premier League in England, the owners of the clubs run the league.
But the so-called Club Owners Association here has abdicated such responsibility for personal favours and crumbs under the table.
Two years ago, the LMC under appointed NFF second vice-president Shehu Dikko lost the lucrative SuperSport television which not only delivered millions of US dollars to the league, but the competition was also broadcast on pay television.
Title sponsors Globacom as well as several other marketing partners have also taken flight as the league has continued to lose credibility and local interest amid crowd violence and wide-spread allegations of match fixing.
Recent disclosures by former staffers of the LMC alleged that the ineffective company has failed to pay its taxes for many years and its finances are shrouded in secrecy.
The LMC has now announced a new sponsorship, which will see it partner a start-up television company, but many observers are skeptical of this latest deal, predicting it will crash like several others before it.
