Mr. Samuel Adoyi is the proprietor, Soccer Stars football academy Abuja. In this interview with Blueprint, he speaks on Nigerian players, football business and the challenges of owning a football outfit.
Excerpt…
Being a club owner…
In football academy, my experience so far has not been a very easy or a soft one especially in the area of finance, and in the area of being able to cope with the management of the entire team.
The coaches – managing them all as human beings with various differences and bringing the players together under an umbrella is not an easy task. We have to put them together, we didn’t want them (the players) to be coming from their various homes, so we have to get them a camp, all of them have to stay together so that they can understand each other, we have to take care of them in the area of their feeding and we fund transportation, is not all also very easy, so all that we have been doing so far have been money, money, money.
The experience, by the mercies of God, I have become so use to it because God has been providing for us to feed them. They are kids from different states – we have some of them from Anambra, Gombe, Kogi State, FCT and other states. All of them are currently together, we have their parental consent for us to keep them because of their age, they’re quite young and so it’s tasking taking care of kids and their health situation.
Managing football club or academy
Originally, we do not have plans to run a football club but as it is, we are confronting the business, we might be trying that. But for now, the set of boys we have in the camp, most of them are not going to stay because even clubs are already coming to pick them from us so as to Feature them in the local league within Nigeria and some will also be going out for trials. So the number of boys we have now will not be enough, very soon we are going to be holding scouting programme so that we can recruit more.
Football academy as lucrative business
When these players do well, they are not only beneficial to themselves but their families, communities, states and Nigeria as a whole. So the business is broad. Most of my players are very young, less than 20 years of age, because many of them in camp just finished secondary school, except for those that have traveled outside Nigeria.
Right now, you can not build something on water. What we are doing at the moment is to build. We are laying foundation, the foundation upon which we can begin to grow from there with time and if you are laying foundation, the quality of the foundation determines the quality of the building that is going to exist on it. If you want to have the best of the boys, then you have to sit-down and do the needful, which is counting the cost before you engage in building itself. That is the reason you see us investing money upon money into it and it will look as if we are not seeing anything but we are already seeing the future with the eye of hope and with the vision of making something out of it tomorrow.
Producing talented young lads
Our academy is only two years old, yet we are already having prospects, though we are registered for about 10 years now. Our target is produce world class players who will compete favourably anywhere in the world. Football is now a big business worldwide.
As it is now, when you talk about football, is in stages, the players we have now are growing. The ones you see today that seems to be as if they are not doing well, over time, they become the main boys on ground. Practice makes perfect. They become perfect over time but the talent we saw in them before we recruited them into the academy is such that we had seen something. We are the ones to bring it out of them so that they can express themselves, that is why we are giving this platform to express themselves so that their best will come out eventually. We shall get to a stage that if God enables us and keep us alive which we know he will, we are going to have something higher than what we are doing as academy.
