The SUB pitch congestion in the second semester. If you’re a lover of the beautiful game at the University of Ibadan, you know this, we know this. In fact, we have written about this extensively. And yet, here we are again. The congestion on the pitch recently reached new heights when fixture clashes between concurrently-running tournaments reportedly devolved into physical fisticuffs over who had the better claim to the pitch. We saw grown men reduced to a petty brawl over who got to slip and slide on that worrisome excuse of a playing surface.
But let us not place all the blame on them. If you think about it, everybody just wants to play the game. But demand has long since overwhelmed supply. In fact, if you are reading this, chances are that you’ve read something similar from another press organization a few days, weeks, or months back. Or you might even stumble on another in subsequent weeks. So how is it that a university with such a vibrant footballing community, and so many competitions has only one fully functional, freely accessible pitch? The students are still responsible for the brawl of course, but it is difficult to ignore the institutional conditions that made the whole thing possible.
The Old Football Stadium, SUB, is the people’s favourite for obvious reasons. Its central location on campus means that you must certainly have passed by it on one occasion or another, or even more favourably been drawn in to stop by and watch a game on your way back from class, pulled in by the roar of the crowd. And perhaps most strongly to its credit, it is free to use, requiring just submitting a letter to the Sports Council, located very conveniently near it.
Its alternative, the New Stadium, along Awo, is a whole other proposition altogether. Unlike SUB, it requires a non-refundable fee paid upfront for its booking. For a small group of players looking for a quick game, it certainly is not a viable option. When you combine its potential cost with its location on campus, far away from most of the hostels on campus, you understand how it makes an altogether unattractive alternative, and why many student organizers rule out its usage from the start.
Another alternative to be is the New Sports Complex, which reportedly according to the University of Ibadan’s master plan, is the permanent new site for sports; a new sports complex meant to replace the demolished 2012 sports complex that has long been mooted for far-away Ajibode, a locus which makes getting to Awo look like a breeze in comparison, but that is another issue altogether. However, there has long been no word on such, and no actionable movement seen in that regard. The ‘New’ in the name is just what it is, it doesn’t exist yet.
The Survival Cup 2026 kicked off on July 31st on the SUB pitch, and was in full swing, but concurrently-run tournaments meant everyone had to share the single pitch and its scheduling slots, whilst factoring in the classes and practical schedules that are mandatory for all involved. So, it happened that you could arrive for a Survival Cup knockout tie at 2:00 PM, end up watching a Faculty Dean’s Cup match at 3:45 PM, and finally see the next Survival Cup fixture hold at 5:00 PM, but anyone who plays football here knows that is hardly unusual. And to the meat of the reference, the Survival Cup final proposed to be played by the early days of September was postponed due to the unavailability of the pitch and didn’t get played till September 16th. The Organizing Committee first announced the postponement in a statement released on September 4th. It was a similar story for the CBN Cup as well, the final of which as of now is still yet to be played, having started at similar times.
The fact that there is only one freely accessible pitch, only tells us that these issues will keep recurring. Come next year, we will talk about the pitch congestion again, and matches will get postponed, and so the cycle will continue. But infrastructure is only a part of the problem. We can make an argument that at the root of all of these is an overarching organizational rot that plagues our football, as well as the larger sports scene in UI. A pointed example of this is how teams scheduled for matches show up late because it is an unwritten rule that matches will start behind schedule. And so, if the teams for fixture one start late, fixture two starts late, three, four and so on until all matches inevitably become delayed behind schedule. This scheduling chaos has more serious consequences than might be obvious at a brief, superfluous glance. The SEALS Cup, although played in the slightly less congested first semester, has seen numerous matches than we can count end in late-night shootouts. In a tournament, especially in its knockout stages, where a missed pen can determine who goes through or goes home, taking a penalty is stressful enough. Now having to do it in poor visibility makes the situation even worse. The past four or so finals were prime examples, with the 2025 edition particularly, which involved a lengthy shootout concluding in total darkness. The following award ceremony and photographs were conducted under the harsh beam of mobile phone flashlights. Some late fixtures have even had to be halted at halftime, or with few minutes left on the clock, forcing teams to return the next day.
Whichever way you look at it, this is not a good look for a university of this pedigree. But this is where the problem becomes bigger than SUB. What we see is in fact a smaller version of a problem that has long plagued Nigerian sport at the national level; enormous sporting passion, poorly matched with institutions that struggle to provide the infrastructure, administration and even basic support required to sustain it. We easily celebrate sports when it brings us trophies and medals. But doing the gruelling work that makes those achievements possible – paying people, maintaining facilities, organising competitions – is another matter entirely.
Take the highly anticipated return of the ‘Lagos derby’ between Lagos clubs to the NPFL. We recently saw Inter Lagos host Sporting Lagos in what unexpectedly became the first premier-tier Lagos derby in a decade. But that particular clash was not initially meant for the history books. That honour was meant for another, originally scheduled for an earlier date – between Sporting Lagos and Ikorodu City. Yet, that initial fixture was postponed. Why? It was neither because of a scheduling clash with another sport nor was it because of weather conditions or a situation that made the pitch unsafe for usage. It was for a POLITICAL rally. Yes, a political event was deemed more important than the very purpose for which a football stadium was built – football. That seemingly small action ended up robbing Ikorodu City of its place in the history books.
And the problem is more than one single NPFL fixture. For years, NPFL has been known for chaos. In 2017/18 the league season was abandoned halfway through because of a leadership tussle in the federation. State-owned clubs are also known to struggle to pay their players, viz the situation with Heartland in 2022. To be fair, in recent years, there’s been genuine efforts to turn things around and the situation has drastically improved. New financial partnerships have stabilised the league somewhat. Prize money increased in 2024 with Enugu Rangers taking home a record 150 million naira as winners. The NPFL is starting to look and feel like a professional league again. But we have not fully cleared the waters yet if after all the progress the league has made, the same old problems can still rear its ugly head.
It gets even worse at the tippity top. Let us begin with the most popular Nigerian team; the men’s football team – Super Eagles. For a nation that prides itself on football, the way the players who don the famous green and white are treated is nothing short of heartbreaking. It has indeed become depressingly familiar to hear of our managers chasing the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) over unpaid wages. Remember Jose Peseiro? In 2022, it was widely reported that he had not been paid since he took charge of the men’s team, a full six months after. The manager before him, Gernot Rohr also dragged the NFF to FIFA to get his unpaid wages sorted.
And if you think NFF – coach disputes are only against foreign coaches, you’re in for a rude shock. Christian Chukwu, Augustine Eguavoen, Samson Siasia, Sunday Oliseh, Florence Omagbemi, Shuaibu Amodu and Stephen Keshi are all highly decorated former Nigerian players who all served at various points as managers of Nigerian teams, and at some point or other faced unpaid allowances or salary disputes.
What happened to the last two is one of the saddest chapters in recent Nigerian sporting history. In June 2016, Nigerian football suffered a devastating week when both legends passed away within three days of each other. What made it worse was the revelation that at the time of their deaths, the NFF owed both men millions of naira in unpaid salaries. Amodu’s own family members publicly stated that his inability to get his rightful wages from the federation left him frustrated, broke, and unable to adequately manage his health.
There is also Sunday Oliseh, who managed the Super Eagles between 2015 and 2016. In an October 2025 podcast, he said the NFF still owes him $26,000 following his resignation on Twitter and revealed that many have urged him to drag the NFF to a FIFA tribunal, but that he does not want “to take his fatherland to a Western court”. There is an uncomfortable irony here: patriotism, which should be a source of pride, becoming another reason for indigenous coaches’s hesitance to pursue what they’re owed.
Florence Omagbemi is another such Nigerian legend. She led the Super Falcons to win the 2016 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, becoming the first woman to win it both as a player and coach. And how was she rewarded? Well, she, along with her players, was owed months of allowances dating back to March of that year. The situation got so bad that the players actually marched to the National Assembly to protest.
Also as recently as the 2025 African Cup of Nations, the Super Eagles threatened to boycott the quarter-final clash against Algeria over unpaid bonuses. It took that threat and the desperate intervention of team captain Ndidi, who promised to pay the allowances out of his own pocket if the money did not arrive before the match, to avert what would have been an international embarrassment. Yet, when the Super Eagles fail to qualify for two consecutive World Cups, the blame falls squarely on the players. While an unpaid bonus might not directly lose a football match, it represents a profound lack of respect. You cannot consistently distract a squad with boardroom squabbles, force them to fight for their basic entitlements, and still expect them to perform at their highest levels.
Promised rewards sometimes take decades to be fulfilled. The legendary 1994 Super Eagles squad won the AFCON and were promised houses by the Federal Government. Do you know when they finally got said houses? 2022. It took 28 years. Sadly, some of those players had already passed away. The dysfunction does not stop at only football. There is D’Tigress, our female basketball team. After winning their third consecutive FIBA Afrobasket title in September 2021, the players had to publicly call out the Nigeria Basketball Federation (NBBF) in a video on X, in order to be paid their $100k Olympic grant and bonuses.
There’s the athletic stage as well. On July 30, 2024, Nigerian athlete Favour Ofili took to X in utter devastation, revealing that she had been excluded from the 100-meter dash in the Paris 2024 Olympics despite qualifying and training for all of four years. There were competing accounts of how the omission happened but the damage was already done. She was enraged enough that she actually tried to switch her allegiance to Turkey, although that was ultimately unsuccessful. She came under lots of fire when she initially announced her intentions to switch, but can we really blame her? She is far from the first to suffer this, and far from the first to look for a way out. There is in fact, a long, depressing history of Nigerian athletes leaving.
Across Nigerian sport, the story is eerily similar. The specific details may change but the underlying problem does not really. The passion is there. Talent is there too. What is missing again and again is a system capable of supporting both.
And that brings us back home.
In a previous editorial, amongst other things, we discussed the university’s newly established sports academy and the importance of not neglecting the football community that’s here. The academy has since run a paid summer camp for participants aged 6 to 23. Again, the academy in itself is a welcome development. But the question of what fate belies the existing infrastructure in UI remains unanswered. For the ordinary student looking for somewhere to play, the reality still remains the SUB pitch – that desolate turf – where students are left to fight on, to slip on, and to get injured on. The existence of and investment in a sports academy when the student community can’t currently point to a decent sports complex is absurd.
It is difficult to overstate the injury risk posed by the state of the SUB pitch. ACL tears, injured menisci and a torn hamstring; we have seen it all. What’s more, we all see the news when popular professional players suffer the same severe injuries. For instance, even in the case of a well-cared-for professional athlete abroad, a severe ACL tear can take up to 9 or 10 months to recover from, including bouts of intensive surgery and rigid rehabilitation schedules and a slow return to the team, and they may still never be the same player again.
Contrast that with a student relying on NELFUND, who takes their hole-ridden boots to the SUB pitch just to escape the depressing monotony of Monday-to-Friday lectures. We play unpaid, solely for the love of the game, only to return to our hostels with such textbook injuries as a torn hamstring because we tripped on a treacherous patch of dirt. And then there is the medical bill for a student just trying to do what they love. Football has a unique reach on this campus. It brings together people who might otherwise have very little reason to meet. Which makes it even more utterly baffling to see is how little investment goes into sustaining it.
The university does not need to solve every problem overnight. But it does need to stop treating predictable problems as though they are unpredictable ones. The competitions are known. The demand is known. The limitations of the pitch are known. Even the tendency for matches to run into darkness is known. A centralised fixture calendar, stricter enforcement of kickoff times, proper maintenance of the SUB pitch and an obvious commitment to developing more accessible playing facilities would all go a long way.
The school has become far too comfortable turning a blind eye to us. Ignoring the state of the pitch has become normal, and if left for too long, we may very well start believing that the problem does indeed not exist.
But it does.
You see it when two competitions are fighting for the same patch of grass, when a student steps onto a pitch knowing fully well that the surface beneath him may be the biggest opponent he faces that day. UI students are not asking for too much by wanting somewhere decent to play. And until we give this elephant in the room the attention it deserves, this pen will keep writing.