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By Amaechi Agbo

The League Management Company, LMC Chairman, Alhaji Shahu Dikko has provided explanations of why the Nigeria Professional Football League, NPFL management decided to call the recently signed partnership with a UK-based company Redstike on the broadcast right of the league, “ground-breaking”, Besthcoicesports.com.ng can report.

Shehu Dikko who has come under immense bashing on how the has been running the league for the past five years likened the it to an oil well with immense potential of yielding enormous financial benefits to investors, clubs and stakeholders.

The LMC last month signed a 5-year investment and commercial partnership deal with Redstrike Sports on behalf of the NPFL, which Dikko described as a ‘ground-breaking’ deal.

In a recent interview on Kennis FM, Dikko, who is also the second vice president of the Nigeria Football Federation, said the league organisers are working hard to ensure more investments come to the NPFL.

“As we have it, everybody have seen this thing (Redstrike partnership) has just come in, but it doesn’t happen overnight,” he said.

“The work was underground for quite some time. That’s why we call it ground-breaking because these are people that are established globally, and they come in and say ‘look, there’s gold in this Nigerian football’. It needs somebody to put the right money, put the right expertise and explore.

“It’s like an oil well. They can give you certificate today say ‘you have an oil bloc’, you just go there you see land. The oil is down, down, down under. You need to go and find huge investment and huge technical capacity to be able to dig that oil well and go to the right level, then, you can be able to extract the oil.

Although the NPFL is rate 9^th best league in Africa, past winners of three editions of the league have not received their prize monies just as the 2019 Aiteo Cup winners, Kano Pillars have been crying to the NFF to pay them their prize money.

The NPFL player are yet to receive any form of palliative or support from the LMC despite many of the clubs owing their players months of salaries.  

Telecommunication giants, MTN remained the last title sponsor of the NPFL. In 2011, the then Nigeria Premier League, signed a deal of N2.5 billion with the South Africa telecom company to sponsor the league for the next four years  2011 to 2014.