Pro Clubs Now to Furnish Sponsors with Annual Reports

3SC's Tare Oke (l) tries to beat Rangers Chukwu during their league clash

By Olawale Ajimotokan

The League Management Company (LMC) has set a tough condition for club sides affiliated to the Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) in a bid to ensure financial best practices and a sure-fire stream of sponsorship money for the teams.

One of the conditions the company is proposing is that the clubs must now give existing or prospective sponsors an auditor’s report on their finances for a given year before they can be offered a fresh sponsorship package.

A member of LMC, Shehu Dikko who shed more light on this new policy road-map for NPFL, said the move became necessary as it would introduce accountability in the management of club football and ensure that sponsors would not be left thinking that their money is not well utilised.

He said that the new approach is in line with global best practices, as professional football clubs in Europe do make copies of audited annual financial reports available to sponsors, who provide the bulk of the funds through which clubs run their business, including payment to the players.

Dikko said that the new model was one of the outcomes of the engagement between LMC and prospective sponsors on how best the clubs and sponsors can maximise the value of professional football sponsorship.

The idea, though novel, will be strange to the clubs which are largely dependent on the magnanimity of state governors who provide almost the entire finances of the clubs which are run for political motive rather than to promote and develop professional football culture in the country.

Only two of the 20 professional football clubs in the elite division- ABS of Ilorin and Nembe City Football Club of Bayelsa State - are privately owned while the rest are run on the annual subvention of government.

Apart from obligation to the sponsors, the LMC is also tinkering with the idea that club chairmen and members of the board be elected for a fixed term so that they can stabilise and be focused on the assignment of running the clubs.

“What you have is a situation where some of the chairmen are merely political appointees who can be appointed and sacked on the impulse of the state governor which appointed them. We must elect a board headed by a chairman for a fixed and renewable term so that they can introduce developmental programmes for their clubs,” Dikko said.