football beyond booundaries - the spark youth empowerment platforms in nigeria

Football Beyond Boundaries


Bankole Cardoso, along with Olaoluwa Aina and Seun Cardoso,is the co-founder of SimplyAds media, the first mass mobile outdoor advertising platform in Lagos. With over 60 digital LED screens on top of Lagos state yellow taxis, they have worked with clients such as YouTube, Dominos, Coldstone, Jumia, Pepsi and concerts. They also recently helped to promote the Nigerian female bobsled team at the Winter Olympics and the launch of the new Nigerian football jersey. In this article, discover how new media can influence the sports industry.

– By Bankole Cardoso

Football in Nigeria is not where it should be. We have the raw talent- very athletic and gifted people but when it comes to competing professionally and on the world stage, we are underachieving because we do not have enough investment in facilities and coaching. Still though, there are a lot of innovations in sports that we can adopt to improve our local game but there must be enough interest from the people to attract the investment that is needed. The good thing is new media is already making an impact.

New media has allowed fans to interact with players and their teams like never before. Through social media, they can follow the lives of their favourite footballers and are able to access so much more information than before. This has made football even bigger than it used to be.

The simplest and most straightforward way that key people in the industry can leverage technology is by using it as a means to connect with the fans. That can be through traditional media like my company SimplyAds, where we supported the launch of the Nigerian football jerseys for the World Cup and as you are likely aware, the Nigerian Jerseys were sold out within three minutes of its launch.

3 million lots sold in 3 minutes! That is unprecedented and shows the thirst for sports, especially football in Nigeria and the social media following that the Super Eagles have. For the future, Virtual Reality will be an interesting new technology that stakeholders should be looking to implement.

Professional footballers are adored all over Nigeria. Just like our Nollywood stars and musicians, they provide entertainment and arguably even more joy for a lot of people that identify as Nigerian. Football is all about the media. The inability of everyone to go to a match doesn’t affect the number of people that’ll watch it, thanks to media. Today with TV, social media and other forms, it is accessible to almost everybody.


Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the Spark magazine. Find the magazine here to read other articles.



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