July 28th, 2023 – Stepping backwards to see farther ahead in Nigerian sports

Segun Odegbami

Officially, the football season in our part of the world has ended. The European Leagues are also on break, and all national football teams have resumed their march to other continental championships.

Even those ones will soon give way to the annual spell when football goes to sleep for almost 2 months and it’s fanatical followers change gears and start the transfer game when players and coaches become commodities in the open market of European football.

Down under in Australia, the football season will begin and only pundits that feed on any football matches from anywhere on the planet during this period remind us there is actually other football Leagues outside Europe of any significance.

Meanwhile, during this period most of us reset the buttons of our sports interests. We move over to car racing and follow Louis Hamilton; or to tennis and follow the exploits of Alcaraz, Djokovic, Coco and Nadal. As I write this, I am preparing for the Queens Club and Wimbledon Tennis Championships.

This summer period, a proposed exciting international programme may take me to the Caribbeans for the first time, to the Islands of Trinidad and Tobago, for a business and Investment Conference laced with a heavy dose of sports. It is part of a grander design to kick-start a solid and sustainable link between West Africa and the Carribeans in a collaboration that shall birth a new relationship between old ‘blood brothers’ separated by the Slave Trade, Centuries ago. The ‘cement’ is Sport.

With Sport as a main ingredient we shall return to Our roots, find common grounds of interest, raise up ‘dead bones’ and breath new life into them, create a social, cultural and economic ecosystem, build a common front and agenda, and come