 Well, it's time for us to talk sports and mighty George. Join us this morning. George, thank you so much for being part of the show. We appreciate your time. Thank you very much for having me. It's great to be here. All right, then. Just a quick one to it. The newly composed entire management committee for the Nigerian professional football league will be inaugurated today by the president of the Nigerian Football Association, Abegyapad and Ibrahim Ghusaw, as composed by the Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Mr. Sondi Dari. And that's in line with the 10-year football master plan as approved by President Mohammad Buhari towards the revitalization of domestic league and that the IMC would be in place to oversee the affairs of the league until a proper professional league board is put in place statutorily. And we're being joined by mighty George. Like I mentioned earlier on, here's a sports analyst. Mighty George, once again, thank you for being with us. Thank you, once again. All right, then let's start on the lighter note. We saw Barcelona tweeting in Yoruba, Agbabola, celebrating asisato suola. How do you respond to this? I mean, first of all, Barcelona know the power of specific public relations, reaching out to the Nigerian fans, the populace, that certainly have their numbers. If you're a social media manager, you definitely want Nigerians on your side because you get the numbers. That tweets actually, as of this morning, has elicited 15,000 retweets. That is more than any tweets that Barcelona feminina put up, at least at the start of the season, except their champions they tried off, of course, last season. So it's very wonderful. And then let's talk about the subject or the objective you like. Asisato suola is just coming back from France, where she imagined 16th best player in the world and had to come back in their first Champions League game of the season, scoring two goals and assisting two in their 9-0 win over Benfica. That's their highest ever Champions League win in history. Before then, in 2017, they had beaten a team 6-0. That's the highest. But this one was something spectacular. And Barcelona, apart from giving it at the MVP award of that day, decided to go a step further and celebrate the Nigerian way. This is absolutely fantastic. She deserves it. And I think that Barcelona know the power of great PR because they have lots of Nigerians on their sides and new followers. I'm sure about that. George, I'd like to speak to what we're losing as a result of our inability to put our house in order to have a proper league that, at least, can be compared to the best in Africa. Nigerian being Africa's most populous nation and having the kind of economy that has been in the past described as Africa's largest economy. What are we losing out? Barcelona, a familiar female football team, is trying to market itself. And like you said, embark on public relations to the Nigerian market, which is one of the biggest in the world. You have the male football teams like Roma. Even tweeting, you'd be asking yourself, maybe it's a Nigerian handling their English Twitter account. What are we losing by not putting our own house and our leagues in order? I mean, you said you've Nigerians love organized football. They love football as it's played in Europe. So anybody that thinks, oh, Nigerian football should be a different kind of football characterized with oligarchism, lack of security, lack of purpose and vision. Some people just own football club for political reasons. And that accounts to why I could nickname the Nigerian professional football, the Nigerian political football, because about 16 or 18 thereabouts of the teams played in that division are owned by governments. And you know what that means. They have to go to government house with a suspension. They might not even employ the best people. It's just going to be a political appointment instead of business people. And that's why any time I have an opportunity, I could talk about my football club, Vander's a football club. There's nobody who would not know that we are getting close. So we are probably a semblance of what's going on in Europe using social media very well, ensuring match day hospitality. We even have premium suits when we play our football game. So some of the teams are taking off now, sporting leaguers and all that, social media, getting top notch, broadcast of games. So a team like Barcelona know that it's business. We're going to get this Nigerians on our side. Apart from celebrating, they just celebrated something that's so exciting to us. And that's one that's over, one all the retweets. And they can do their sales and do their marketing like that. So Nigerian football first is not on TV. It's not attractive. It is riddled with polygonism, match fixing, and all that. I just hope that the newly constituted the Interim Management Committee of the League would be able to start their journey to reshape the league. But we're definitely missing out a lot. We are not doing football. The way football has progressed to right now, we're still doing it like, of course, ages ago, which is sad, very terrible. So let's talk about your thoughts now. Just as you have landed talking about our league now, domestic league and the intentions of the president. With the election of the NFF president and the fact that there's going to be a committee that will be inaugurated. What do you think the priority should be? Well, priority, I think, there are a host of them. All those biases really in the NFF, I think they first need to think about how we can improve infrastructure. Infrastructure has been a pain, a major pain. You don't have attractive stadium. Since this is even coming from governments, and we see a policy inside this 10-year master plan. Because by the way, the constitution of this interim management committee is an excerpt of the 10-year master plan. So the NFF is agreed with the sports ministry probably for the first time that instead of carrying on with the old MPFL, which is the elite league, although of course we have NNL, we have NLO, we have NWFL, but instead of carrying on with the composition as it were of the elite league, let's dismantle it, you know, let's tear it apart because it hasn't helped us so much and let's come with disappointees. So I think that it's a first that by interfacing with governments, thankfully it's emanating from governments, so to say, to see how they can provide infrastructure, stadium, you know, fix some stadium, that's the job of governments. You know, not to own a football team, but have a head that Liverpool, we own by the Liverpool, you know, state government, no way, give that opportunity to the private sector. Anything that government can do, they can help out with security. They control the security apparatus of the state. They can help out with the infrastructure so that we can have good stadiums that will be very great for broadcast. They can help out with good roads. You know, when you're abroad and you're going to watch a game, there's a train station that stops in front of, you know, Stanford Bridge. Maybe I'm going too far. That's England. We all know how miles apart we are. But countries like Egypt are doing, countries like Ghana are providing, you know, boss terminals and good roads to lead to those stadiums. Because that's the only way. If fans don't feel secure going to the stadium and even being at the stadium, the league is not going to be attractive. They're not going to make money and they're not going to win their loyalty like Barcelona is trying to do to Nigeria. And now so focused on European football. That said, the issue of referees should be critically looked into. The Premier League actually controls, you know, the, what was known as the English Premier League, you know, the English Premiership. It's now called the Premier League. It's controlled by all the clubs and there's a private corporate connotation to it. It's not actually handled by the FA. That's why you haven't heard the English FA except of course you want to talk about the freelance of England. So to help out with that, the referee, like I was saying, is controlled, managed by a company who pay them salaries, who select these referees. That's why you see the likes of Howard Ware was a police officer. They are looked into, checked, investigated to see that they are people of, you know, unquestionable character before they admitted to be referees and not just hungry people who don't have a job to do. Because this is business. We're trying to make sure that this football is lucrative. Let's not just pack anybody in it, political appointments or dates or that. You bring somebody because he speaks, you teach him the laws of the game. He doesn't even know everything. And then at the end of the day, he ends up disgracing himself or collecting money and things like that. So, I mean, that be holds on whoever is going to manage the issues of referees because if we have fair football, fair playing, football, and this is broadcast to the whole world, I'm telling you sponsors will come because this is how transparent, you know, the other leagues are. And a whole lot of people. You know, I mean, you've said it all. I wonder if it's anything good can come out of Nazareth, you know, I wonder. Because when we were in school, in secondary school, we're taught in computer studies, GIGO, and GIGO, we're taught, it's good for garbage in, garbage out, you know. And do we have the personnel, you know, both from the ministry of sports, the same ministry that we drew Nigeria from basketball after the females qualified for the workout or the Olympics, whichever it is that we drew them. We've seen several, you know, instances of poor decision making. Do we have the personnel, the manpower, the brains, the people with the ideas to, even if it's an IMC, okay, interim management committee, term master plan to bring anything different than we've seen in the past. And I'm wondering why we don't have guys like you. All right, guys like you, you know, coming up to say, I want to run football in my state, in my country, you know, because, do we have the personnel, the manpower, the people, the brains? Unfortunately, you know what the sports ministry is, most times, except it's actually changed in different clients now. Sports, sports, because sports is supposed to be on that business. In Nigeria, it's always been under the pressure. So, government pays little, no attention to it. And that's why any president that comes and given it's manifesto doesn't even include sports. Sports is just, you know, they call it UT apartments, which is not supposed to be so. So the kind of people that you have there in a ministry, which is a government setting that, you know, like I said, appointees, who come into the ministry not really having any prior knowledge, just like the minister of sports, he's never been a sports person. He was just a director in the MCC, you know, his last outing in a top position. And then he's a member of the APC, and then voila, he's a minister of sports. And so you come into the terrain, try to adapt, you ruffle feathers, you know, step on toes, have a running battle with the MBBF, have that with the NFF. You mean well, but you really don't know how these things go. And you need to get the right people, which is what they don't want. It's very clear in all spheres of this country, you hardly get the right people there because this one's at it. You need people who work with you and do the bidding. And maybe at the end of the day, your tenure is up in HHS. You say, oh, I did this, I did that. But you can actually do more. So we have a few of them. Let's even talk about the members of the IMC. Big guy, is a former chairman of the House Committee on Sports. I think that was in the last dispensation. And since then, he's been without a job as it is. And the vice chairman is the chairman of a quite united, Elder Paul Bassi, veteran journalist, no doubt has calf experience, later quite united to be a title win two seasons ago, which is great. You know, coming in representing the administrators. We also have Calvin Muka, who's a London-based journalist. You know, it's full of football for a very, very long time. And we'll talk about the glory days and now the bad days, which is also great. I mean, someone, one of my colleagues there, making it in. And then I noticed that the secretary was a former secretary of the Bollywood Foundation. So you see, and at the end of the day, there's a political appointment, illuminated by the election. You know, so let's just hope that this 10-year master plan, which was, you know, on field about two months before the election, they would abide by it. It looks very good, but not everybody was consulted. You know, it's just a group of people who sat down and did their research and put it on a round. All right, so quick. We're just hoping it's a new dispensation. So we're hoping that, let's watch how the, how the affairs put this thing. Judge, we have to go about justice in a few seconds. You have talked about time and our interest in our football. I'd like to ask if you think that there might just be a plan in the way for us to have the same prominence that you have all the premier leagues having in the world. I mean, following TV time. So you look at the La Liga, you look at the Premier League and all of the, you know, time that they have. Is there a way, do you think that, you know, this administration is thinking towards that direction? And I'm asking now. Like I said earlier, we can only hope so. If we talk about football specifically, the new man in charge, unfortunately, the predecessor didn't help him start on a good footing because immediately after he won the election, you know, I'm at your clinic, posted, reportedly posted in a group that have successfully installed one of my men, you know, and that message leaked. So already it's being seen as a stooge to the former, you know, NFF president and now FIFA and CAF member. And if you look at the antecedents of his predecessor, you know, I mean, the number one thing that excelled there during the administration was himself because from nobody got himself into the FIFA council of only just a few men in this world. So we hope he will not be as selfish. We hope that he carries everyone along. The ministry and the NFF prior to now have not been in good terms. Let's hope that they're in good terms. It looks like because the IMC was a proposal from the government and the NFF has taken it. So there's some good intention and you know how this starts, you know, it's the first month of the new NFF board. They're going to be hoping to get the ground running. They have appointed a task force for eight great teams to ensure that we only have true under 17s, true under 15s, which is great. I hope those people have the zeal and all that. So, maybe we're just hoping at the moment, but if you look at it, it's almost the same people who came back. You saw the NFF president has been chairman of chairman for eight years prior to now. So it's just, you know, it was part of the same and just moving forward. Let's watch it. Let's watch and see how it goes. But the way, you know, everything was arranged and desperation, the dollar, spreading, you know, high and beta and all that, which characterizes for them. Elections in Nigeria went to play. And when that happens, you want to ask questions. But as he did now, I brought Hanmi in. We have to let this go now for the want of time. You have said that we'll watch and see how it pans out. Unfortunately, you've also highlighted that, you know, we have the same crop of peasants and we might necessarily not, you know, get a different result, but let's see how, you know, what happens after now. Thank you so much, Mighty George, for joining us this morning on the breakfast on Plus TV Africa. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, then we'll be speaking with Mighty George, he's a sports analyst. He joined, he joined, well, the way from a quibbub state and that's it. That's the size of the shortest morning. It's been very engaging and interesting. And if you missed out on any part, it will be right for you to follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram on YouTube, what Plus TV Africa and Plus TV Africa lifestyle. My name is Messia Boko. Have a great morning. And my name is Kofi Bartel. So return on Monday. Have a fantastic weekend. Good morning.