Football in Nigeria: One Site Tells the Story

Eighty people, crammed onto benches dragged in from a nearby shop, stop moving at the same instant. The television is wide, its sound turned to full, and outside, traffic has thinned in the warm evening heat.

Football came to Nigerian soil the way significant ideas usually do: gradually, through imported rules, and then it never left. The British brought the game. The children made it their own. Long before they finished school, most had already declared a loyalty and would not be moved from it.

What Footballinnigeria.com.ng offers is not difficult to explain: it reports on the Super Eagles from first press conference to last match. The Super Eagles, with their AFCON trophies and their ability to send footballers to every major league on earth, created a hunger for information that a paragraph in a national newspaper rarely addressed. So the site was built that matched the depth of the audience's knowledge.