The Site That Covers Nigerian Football

Ninety people, crammed onto benches dragged in from a nearby shop, stop moving at the same moment. Nobody stirs. This is Nigeria, and this is football, and Footballinnigeria the two have never been apart.

Football came to Nigerian soil the way most lasting things do: gradually, through imported rules, and then it never left. The British brought the ball. The young men kept it. Long before they finished school, most had already declared a loyalty and were unlikely to abandon it.

FootballInNigeria.com.ng was built on a straightforward premise: Nigerian football deserved coverage that matched the passion of the people who followed it. The platform traces Nigerians playing abroad: the strikers in the Bundesliga whose names the country tracks across time zones. It reports on the NPFL with the same attention it gives to European football, and every piece of coverage is shaped by an understanding of what Nigerian football means to the people who live it.

Football in Nigeria exists at a size that the numbers only begin to capture. Football Nigeria coverage exists inside a country that is growing faster than almost anyone predicted. Over 84 percent of Nigeria's web traffic moves through handheld devices, which means that the football-following public come to their news quickly, through phones, between moments of work and sleep. The game in Nigeria feeds on communal watching.

The editor at a Nigerian Football publication carries a specific kind of weight. There is something definite that occurs when a Nigerian football fan who reads journalism that does not oversimplify. The story gets shared before the day is out. They bookmark the site. The best Nigerian football writing demands more than a scoreline. This is the work that Footballinnigeria has set itself.

Nigeria's domestic league has twenty professional sides and a calendar that produces hundreds of matches. The diaspora of Nigerian footballers are now playing across every major league in Europe, representing the country from pitches thousands of miles from home. Clubs like Enyimba FC hold the CAF Champions League twice, a reminder that the story of Nigerian football is richer than transfer headlines alone suggest. All of it is tracked at Football in Nigeria, there when the news breaks.

Key Statistics Behind the Story

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• Nigeria had more than 103 million internet users as of January 2024, the highest total of any country on the African continent. [DataReportal, Digital 2024: Nigeria]
  
• Over eighty-four percent of Nigerian web traffic flows through smartphones, making it one of the most handheld-internet populations on earth. [Statista / DataReportal]
  
• Nigeria has won the Africa Cup of Nations three times: in 1980, 1994, and 2013, and made the final of the 2023 AFCON, Footballinnigeria falling to Ivory Coast in the final. [Wikipedia / CAF]
  
• Enyimba FC, Nigeria's most decorated club, has won the Nigerian Premier League on nine occasions and lifted the CAF Champions League on two occasions, proof that the domestic game has long competed at the highest level of the continent. [The Guardian Nigeria]
  
• Viewing centres, those uniquely Nigerian institutions where fans gather to share a single screen, are a social institution with no real equivalent elsewhere. [The Guardian Nigeria]
  
• Nigeria's internet penetration rate is expected to rise to around 48 percent by 2027, a figure that suggests the digital readership for football in Nigeria is far from its peak. [Statista]
  

The reader in the back of the viewing centre will stay until the final whistle and then walk home through streets that are filling again. In the morning he will look for the story that puts words to what he saw. The best Nigerian football writing earns its readers the same way the game itself does: by being right, consistently, over a long time. He will find it at FootballInNigeria.com.ng.