Sporting Lagos: A Nigerian football club run with a startup mindset

One of Africa's most successful tech entrepreneurs embarks on a new adventure – outside of tech — to solve football’s problems

Welcome to a new dispensation. 🍷

This article was spurred by a recurring question I’ve had for a long time: what does it take to start and run a successful football club in Africa’s most populous country?

Brace up for a delightful read ahead.

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On any given Wednesday afternoon, 22-year-old Destiny Mercy can be found at work in Suru Alaba, a commercial district in Lagos near Alaba International Market, the largest electronics market in Nigeria. But on this particular Wednesday by 12:15 PM she closed for the day under the pretense of not feeling well and dashed off to the Mobolaji Johnson Arena (formerly Onikan stadium) which was 30 minutes away. 

As her Uber ride got to the stadium she, expecting to be the first fan at the stadium, found out that she wasn’t the only one who showed up that early for a 2 PM match. About a hundred people were already at the stadium that afternoon, with some in their corporate attire.  

Mercy was among the hundreds of fans who showed up at Nigeria’s oldest stadium on June 14, 2023, to watch the final game of the season.  Most of the fans came to cheer the home team Sporting Lagos, which was playing for the opportunity to qualify for the playoffs in order to be promoted to Nigeria’s premier football league. Sporting Lagos was founded in February 2022 by one of Nigeria’s most successful tech entrepreneurs, Shola Akinlade. The Y Combinator-backed startup, Paystack, which he co-founded in 2015 was acquired in 2020 by American fintech giant Stripe for over $200 million. 

To the delight of the home fans Sporting Lagos won the match against Smart City FC by a wide margin (4 - 0) but there appeared to be confusion in the stadium at the sound of the final whistle. The players and fans weren’t sure whether to celebrate yet. 

“It felt like I had incomplete joy. I couldn’t return to my office immediately. I had to stay around the stadium, checking social media and asking around to know whether Sporting Lagos qualified,” says Mercy.

Sporting Lagos was tied on points at the top of the table but separated on goal difference with another team, Ijebu United, which was also still playing its final game at a different stadium. Only the team at the top of the table would proceed to the playoffs.  If Ijebu United managed to score more goals they could edge out Sporting Lagos on goal difference. The fans and the players at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena wondered why the other match which was ongoing past the 100th minute mark hadn't ended. Complaints about the irregularities that beleaguered the Nigerian football league flew around. 

The tension increased when the Ijebu United match was paused, an unusual occurrence in modern football matches, causing many emotionally drained fans to start heading home. About thirty minutes after the end of the Sporting Lagos match, word spread in the stadium that the Ijebu United match had finally ended 3 - 1 in favour of Ijebu United and Sporting Lagos had qualified for the playoffs. The few remaining fans in and around the Mobolaji Johnson Arena celebrated.

Akinlade who was still at the stadium was dressed casually in a black T-shirt and trousers with sneakers. His sweaty and beaming face said it all as congratulatory messages were exchanged. 

Three weeks later, Sporting Lagos secured its promotion during the playoffs. This was a significant feat for a year-old club which struggled with relegation in its first season. The promotion was a form of validation that 38-year-old Akinlade who had embarked on a new adventure – outside of tech — to solve football’s problems in Nigeria was on the right path. 

A cause worth pursuing

“Being a software engineer is about problem-solving. In football, there are multiple problems we’re trying to solve here,” Akinlade said before the start of the club’s first season in 2022. “It sounds simple but there are big questions such as ‘How do we start a football club from scratch, what does long-term talent development mean and what does it take for Nigeria to win the World Cup?’” 

Akinlade grew up playing football just like many Nigerian kids, but a small stature and other interests meant that as he grew older playing football took a back seat. The idea to start a football club started brewing after Akinlade lost his dad in 2021. This was his way of giving back to the community and leaving a legacy. To decide on whether it was a cause worth pursuing, he started asking around.

“For a quiet and reserved person, talking to people is one of the ways Shola makes decisions,” says Ekene Agu, a member of Sporting Lagos governing council. Akinlade spoke to many people including other club owners in Nigeria such as Lekki United founder Akin Alabi and Remo Stars founder Kunle Soname, who’s also the first Nigerian to acquire a European club. Some people tried to dissuade him but ultimately the conversations bolstered his resolve to take the leap of faith.

Seven years ago, he had done the same thing when founding Paystack. Then, the idea for the payment processing company came up while Akinlade, a consultant to banks, was showing friends that they could directly charge their cards without going through the hurdle of existing financial intermediaries. Akinlade showed it to many friends until one, Osita Nwoye, told him that his idea was actually what a US company, Stripe, did. All he had to do was build the Stripe of Africa – which he did.

This time he was starting a football club in a country where football is seen as a hobby and investing in a club as a tech founder means turning a blind eye to starting or investing in more tech startups as an investor. 

But it’s not difficult to see why Akinlade ventured into the football business beyond passion. It’s the most popular sport in the world, with over 300,000 clubs, 240 million players and five billion fans across every continent. Globally football generates an annual revenue of $47 billion, accounting for 28 percent of the turnover generated by sports worldwide. 

“There’s some sentimental aspect to him [Akinlade] doing this but generally it's a good investment. It’s a form of diversification of investment,” Jing Jing Liu, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at MacEwan University says. “Think of Actor Ryan Reynolds buying Wrexham FC or Snoop Dogg’s recent announcement to buy a Canadian hockey team.”

The club hasn’t downplayed its intention to make money, because in order to build a transgenerational football club, it has to be a commercially viable one. This a rarity in Nigeria where many football clubs aren’t run as a business but instead as philanthropy or for political virtue signalling. Out of the 20 clubs in the Nigerian Premier League, only three are privately owned with the remaining owned by state governments.

“The Nigerian league is one of the only leagues in the world where the funding allocation to teams depends on how interested the governor of the state is in football,” says Wiebe Boer, the author of a book on the history of soccer in Nigeria and President of Calvin University. “And that’s a very bad way to run a football club because football coaches and players aren’t civil servants or political tools.” 

Obsessing over user experience, embracing scrappiness

Early on, Akinlade made it clear that his priority was leading Paystack and not running a football club, so he rallied around an initial group of close friends and hired a pair of experienced hands to run the technical aspect of running a club. 

Together, they approached running a football club with a startup mindset: obsessing over user experience, embracing scrappiness and flexibility while defying conventional wisdom.

“Before the club’s first game, about seven of us spent hours every day for two weeks thinking about what type of environment we need to create for people to want to watch live sports,” Agu says. “In lean startup methodology, they say you should build for your best first customer. For us that’s our community, we know people love quality and excellence.” 

The team initially consulted some sports experts in Nigeria on how to build a vibrant fanbase but the advice they got wasn’t what they expected. The experts advised them to pay agencies to get people from the streets to fill the stadium. Afterwards, they could get sponsors on board by showing them the club had a large fanbase. When the team rejected the idea, the experts scoffed at their naivety. 

Left to their naivety and desire to make this work, the team turned to the results from initial user research for inspiration. It revealed that the club needed to first tackle two major issues: safety and stadium ambience. Many people they spoke to complained about not feeling safe at the stadium, so they invested in security. For every home game, the club hires on average 30 bouncers in the stadium, 15 police officers with trucks and a command centre with security consultants. 

To improve the stadium ambience, they paid to clean the stadium and adorned the entrance of the stadium with carpets and colourful Sporting Lagos banners – an arduous task considering the deplorable state of the stadium. The first time they cleaned the Teslim Balogun Stadium, 50 people spent two days on the job, which included digging up the gutters. 

For a smooth matchday experience, fans were directed to buy tickets online, a superficially simple introduction but a radical one, considering that match tickets are popularly only sold over the counter in exchange for cash in Nigeria. Working closely with Tix, a ticketing platform, also meant that the club could make custom requests to suit their peculiar use cases. Fans who couldn’t make it to the stadium have the option of watching live games on YouTube.

“We took an agile approach to starting the club. We weren’t wasting time doing long unnecessary paperwork and research,” says Femi Siji-Keneth, one of the seven friends who helped bring Sporting Lagos to life. “For us, the mindset was let’s just move; if we fail then at least we know we tried.” 

This approach was evident in how the club was announced to the public. The announcement of the new club was done via a tweet by Akinlade in February 2022, as opposed to a more elaborate unveiling ceremony. Sporting Lagos’ first website was a notion page created by Akinlade. 

By the end of the first season, the new club was a breath of fresh air to the Nigerian football league but the team’s lacklustre performance was a reminder that the new cool kid on the block also needed to win matches to stay alive. 

Passing up on the opportunity to do the regular thing

If the first season produced the minimum viable product version of the club, the second season which started in February 2023, introduced a minimum marketable product. It was time to double down on being more successful on the field, building a massive fanbase and making more money.

To improve success on the field, the club changed coaches, brought in new players and adopted tech tools to improve its player performance.

“What’s different about Sporting Lagos is that everyone supports you to win,” Paul Offor, Sporting Lagos Coach says. “This is the first time in my career that I’m given a free hand to make decisions concerning players and other tactics.” 

Because it’s difficult to improve players' gameplay if vital statistics can’t be measured, an automatic tracking camera that uses AI to follow ball movements was deployed to record all games. Match video footage is fed into Manaja, a platform that uses AI to generate post-game match statistics. The players also occasionally wear a tracking device to measure performance statistics during training and matches. 

A cynical eye might wonder whether the use of these tech products changed anything. It did. Offor shared that using tools like Manaja has “helped the players see how they’re performing and aspire to improve on making successful passes, interceptions or contributing to scoring a goal.”

In a league where many clubs barely pay attention to social media, it has played a big role in building Sporting Lagos’ vibrant fanbase of over 50,000 followers across all social media platforms. The club uses appealing designs and memes to connect with its youthful fanbase. A 400% Twitter followership growth in June and 3,000 new followers gained from a viral meme tweet, according to Agu, is proof that the social media strategy is working. 

Globally, the major revenue streams of football clubs are commercial revenue, match day revenue, broadcasting rights fees, player transfer fees and merchandising. Being commercially viable requires tapping into all these streams.

From the onset, the club struck partnership deals with a number of local tech startups such as Piggyvest, Chowdeck, Cassava and Klasha. Revenue from match ticket prices which vary from ₦‎1,000 ($1.2) to ₦‎10,000 ($10.2) is still low due to poor attendance. The club has created a fan activation team to increase attendance numbers, shared cash prizes during half-time games and provided buses to transport students from higher institutions to the stadium.

“We came up with the idea of the Happy Corner [fan club], free refreshments for people who pay to attend games and after-game parties when we win matches,” says Ohis Oyakhire, a member of the fans activation team. “All these are to engage with the fans better.” 

One fan shared that before Sporting Lagos games the only activities she looked forward to doing on the weekends were going to the club and church. 

Revenue from broadcasting rights is currently non-existent due to a decade-long dispute among the league authorities on how best to go about this. Sporting Lagos and other clubs have taken matters into their own hands by simply streaming their matches on YouTube.

In March 2023, the club launched its own Academy to groom local talents and Akinlade doubled down on his new adventure by acquiring a majority stake in 76-year-old Danish club Aarhus Fremad, joining a handful of African entrepreneurs who have a foothold in the ownership stakes of European football. With these in place, there’s a clearer path for top talents within Akinlade’s football empire: they can easily move between Nigeria and Europe.  

Traditionally, many Nigerian clubs don’t sell jerseys, bucket hats or T-shirts but Sporting Lagos is banking on unlocking this revenue stream. The club already ships its jerseys to fans in countries such as London, the US, and Ghana. 

Unlocking these different revenue streams in an uncharted territory sounds like a stretch but the club is banking on its access to data that many other clubs overlook.

“Leveraging tech means I have data,” Agu says. “When I go talk to potential sponsors I can tell them how many followers we have, how many people tune into my stream, how many people bought my jersey and visited my website.”

It’s still early to decide on whether all these efforts will pan out in making Sporting Lagos commercially viable but Siji-Kenneth has seen enough to trust in the power of disruption. 

“We had the opportunity to do the regular thing many other clubs are doing. But Shola was dogged that we had to do it differently,” Siji-Kenneth says. “This experience has made me wonder that maybe starting and running a successful football club is not as difficult as we think. Maybe all it takes is the dedication to not cutting corners and giving people an experience that we want to have.”

The start of a new season

At 6 PM on July 27 at the Sporting Lagos camp in Surulere, a residential area in Lagos, the mood is relaxed and jovial. At the coaches’ lounge Coach Paul Offor is attending an online training session for his UEFA coaching licence on his iPad. Many players who’ve arrived at the camp, which is a couple of apartments in the same compound, are in their hostel-like rooms gisting or on their phones. The club’s first training session for the 2023/2024 Nigeria professional football league season took place that morning. 

Assistant coach, Micah Bello who’s at the players' lounge welcomes 20-year-old winger Jonathan Alukwu, who strolls in with his box and a different hair colour. Last season his pink-dyed hair earned him the nickname Barbie. 

Bello talks about the uncertainties around the format of the Nigerian Premier Football League and when the new season will start. There were debates over choosing between an abridged league system to save costs due to the economic condition of the country and a regular 38-match league system that’s used in top European leagues. The abridged system is economically appealing as it involves fewer matches, less travelling and expenses but it also means fewer match bonuses and travel allowances. Later that month, the Nigerian Football Federation settled on a regular 38-match league system. 

The new season which was supposed to start on August 28, was postponed by a month. Thousands of Sporting Lagos fans like Manolo Etuk, a content strategist, are eagerly waiting for the start of the new season. Sporting Lagos’s first match in the new league is slated for Monday, October 2.

When Etuk looks back at the club’s journey, one of his fondest memories is the club’s first game in March 2022. Amid the excitement in the stadium, while the match went on, there were three old men sitting behind him who kept on making negative comments about the chances of the new club surviving six months in the league.

“I was trying to explain to them that what we’re bringing is new and different,” says Etuk. “They didn’t believe it then but I hope they do now.”