Across Nigeria, young athletes such as Rasheed Fatai, Hawau Olayode and Gloria Akinyemi are chasing sports dreams in environments plagued by poor facilities, overcrowded pitches, and minimal support. Their resilience highlights both the promise of Nigerian talent and the urgent need for investment in school and grassroots sports to preserve potential and build a sustainable pipeline for national and economic growth. MOYOSORE SALAMI reports.

Rasheed Fatai’s football journey began on a dusty school playground in Ondo State, long before he ever set his foot in Lagos.

Today, the young footballer trains at the Berger Mini Stadium in Lagos, a facility that should represent opportunity, but often reminds him of how fragile that dream is.

“When it rains, we can’t train. If it rains today, for example, we may not train for the next two days because the pitch is bad and there is no proper maintenance,” Fatai told The Guardian.

For him, football was never just a sport but a refuge shaped by family, loss and chance encounters.

He recalled that his father was a football supporter and used to follow him to football viewing centres to watch matches but after he lost him, he started following his elder brother instead.

Those regular visits sparked something deeper. Watching stars like Kevin De Bruyne, he began to imagine himself on the pitch. In school, his talent quickly stood out.

“People started seeing the potential in me and even called me ‘Neymar’ because of my playing style.

Yet, his early years were far from structured. His secondary school offered limited sporting opportunities, and facilities were basic. Still, football found its way to him through friendship.

When his school introduced the Principal’s Cup, participation became compulsory for all classes. Then in JS2, a close friend, the team captain selected him for the squad. “That was how my football journey really started,” Fatai said.

His team finished second after losing 4–2 in the final to the school team, but the tournament changed his life. He was selected to train with the school’s main team and soon began travelling across Yoruba-speaking states including Ondo, Osun and Ogun for inter-school competitions.

Along the way, one figure remained constant: the school coach, Mr. Acro. “Anytime he saw me down, he kept encouraging me, he told me he saw a lot of potential in me and that the world must know me. He made me promise never to give up on football,” he said.

After leaving his hometown in search of better opportunities, Fatai moved across several states before eventually arriving in Lagos, where he joined Zenith Emperor FC. He has been with the club for two years.

But the challenges followed him. “We find it difficult to train properly because of lack of facilities, it is affecting us as players and football generally.”

At Berger Mini Stadium, congestion has become another obstacle. With the Nigeria Nationwide League One season approaching, the pitch is overcrowded with teams holding trials.

“Sometimes we are supposed to train from 7am to 9am, but we are only given one hour, everything is rushed, and it affects our performance on the field,” he explained.

For Fatai, the consequences go beyond missed training sessions. He said many young players have quietly walked away from football altogether. “A lot of young footballers have quit learning for other skills because of this,” he said.

As he continues to train on a pitch vulnerable to rain, time pressure and neglect, Fatai believes the solution lies in collective responsibility.

“I’m pleading on behalf of my colleagues, both the government and private sector should come to our rescue. We need proper facilities here in Lagos. Don’t let football go down.”

Fatai’s story is far from unique. Across Nigeria, countless young athletes navigate similar obstacles, chasing dreams in sports that demand dedication, resilience, and opportunity or at least, the chance to train in safe, well-equipped facilities. One of them is Hawau Olayode, whose Taekwondo journey at Tai Solarin University of Education revealed the struggle and triumph of athletes in disciplines far removed from football.

What began as a university pastime for Olayode has grown into a medal-winning Taekwondo career, but behind her gold victories at the Nigerian University Games (NUGA) and the National Sports Festival lies a story shaped by inadequate facilities and constant injury management.

Olayode began her Taekwondo journey in her second year, first semester. While the sport excited her, the physical and mental demands were intense. The conditions she trained under were far from ideal: no standard mats, insufficient protective gear, and unsafe environments.

According to her, there were no standard facilities or adequate equipment to support proper preparation. Training sessions were often conducted in environments she considered unsuitable for a combat sport that requires safety, structure and technical precision.

She explained that the absence of proper mats and protective gear contributed to frequent injuries, many of which she had to manage on her own in order to remain competition-ready. At certain points, she felt the lack of appropriate facilities affected her performance.

Despite these limitations, Olayode went on to secure gold medals at both NUGA and the National Sports Festival. Yet, victory did not bring complete satisfaction.

She noted that while winning confirmed her ability, it also exposed the gap between what she achieved and what could have been possible in a better-equipped system. In her words, she felt she had succeeded, but not fully.

According to her, athletes who train in structured environments with modern equipment experience a different level of fulfilment and confidence. She believes improved facilities would not only enhance performance but also increase athletes’ enthusiasm to train and compete.

Beyond performance, she pointed to safety concerns as a major deterrent for parents considering Taekwondo for their children. She noted that as a combat sport, Taekwondo already carries inherent risks, and without proper protective equipment and safe training environments, parents may withdraw their support out of fear of injury.

In her view, the consequences of poor infrastructure go beyond medals. It affects motivation, psychological readiness and participation at the grassroots level. Olayode maintained that without relevant equipment and conducive training spaces, Nigeria risks limiting the potential of young athletes before their talent is fully realised.

For Gloria Akinyemi, swimming was not her childhood ambition. It began as a compulsory course when she gained admission into the University of Ibadan.

She started in her first year and was even her class representative at the time, a position she held until third year. But her introduction to the sport was disrupted almost immediately.

On the very first day of swimming class, during dry land warm-up, she stepped into an open gutter. A cement slab fell on her leg, leaving her injured. Instead of entering the pool with her classmates, she sat out the session and the week that followed recovering.

That early setback was only the beginning of the challenges she would encounter.

According to her, swimming facilities are expensive to maintain. Even hotel pools that are not Olympic-standard require significant funding. There were periods when the university pool was poorly managed because of the cost of chemicals and maintenance materials. During such times, training was suspended. “When the pool is not properly managed, there’s no swimming,” she explained.

To keep training, she and her teammates often had to seek alternative pools outside the school whenever access was restricted.

But beyond her personal experience, Akinyemi noted that despite these limitations, the bigger issue went beyond her one experience.

She added that providing proper swimming facilities across the country would be transformative and the country could produce far more competitors, even world record holders.

“Imagine if those young children that play in the river after school hours have a place to actually build on that passion and interest and be good at it. Imagine just how many competitors and world record holders we would produce in Nigeria.”

She further emphasised that the problem is not a shortage of gifted swimmers but the absence of the environment needed to nurture them.

The Silent Disappearance of Playgrounds.
For many Nigerians, their first memories of sports are tied to school fields and neighbourhood playgrounds, dusty football pitches, makeshift courts or spaces where raw talent first found expression. Today, those spaces are steadily vanishing.

The Guardian observed that some government school fields have been overtaken by weeds and erosion. Rusted goalposts lean dangerously, while the track lines have faded into the earth.

According to the 2025 National Youth Sports Survey, across Nigeria, only 18 per cent of public secondary schools have functional sports facilities. Experts warn that without early investment, many talented athletes are lost before they reach national competitions.

Founder of Zenith Emperor Football Club, a third-tier side in the Nigerian football league, Rajih Rahman Edatomola, said the neglect of school sports facilities has continued to weaken Nigeria’s ability to discover and develop young talent.

Edatomola recalled that many of Nigeria’s celebrated sportsmen emerged from organised school systems. He mentioned legends such as Muyiwa Osuntolu, Segun Odegbami and Teslim ‘Thunder’ Balogun, who were discovered through school competitions at institutions like St. Finbarr’s College and C.M.S. Grammar School, adding that the school environment once provided a clear pathway from playgrounds to national and international stages.

According to him, schools are meant to be the foundation for talent identification, but many no longer have basic sporting infrastructure such as playable pitches, equipment or trained sports teachers. He explained that it is through inter-house sports and school competitions that raw ability is usually discovered, yet many students today do not even get the opportunity to participate meaningfully.

Edatomola noted that when schools lack facilities, talented children are easily overlooked and their abilities remain hidden, noting that the problem does not stop at the school level, as local academies also suffer from the absence of spaces where young athletes can train, compete and grow.

He explained that where there are no football pitches or gyms, students are left with theory rather than practical exposure, a situation that affects skill development, confidence and long-term interest in sports. Over time, he said, such talents become rusty, not because they lack ability, but because there is no structure to nurture them.

For him, improving school sports facilities should not be seen as an extra or luxury project insisting that it is a necessity if Nigeria wants a sustainable future in sports, especially at a time when the country is struggling with youth unemployment and rising social vices.

A retired physical education teacher, Kunle Adebayo, recalled a time when sports development in Nigeria did not depend on expensive academies or private facilities. It happened naturally within school compounds and open community fields.

“In the past, we didn’t need to look for talent. Talent found us,” he said.

According to him, schools were once the primary breeding grounds for athletes. During break time, children filled football pitches, improvised courts, and sandy tracks. After school hours, the playground remained alive with movement sprint races between friends, high jumps over makeshift bars, swimming contests in nearby streams.

Physical education teachers and volunteer coaches paid attention. “During break time or after school, children played. Coaches watched. That was how many national athletes were discovered,” he added.

He explained that talent identification was not a formal event; it was observational. A child’s speed during a casual race, their coordination in a handball game, or their stamina on the field often caught the eye of a teacher who would then nurture that ability.

But as school playgrounds shrink, fields are converted to buildings, and structured sports periods disappear from timetables, that organic system has gradually collapsed.

Without these foundational spaces, he warned, sports development loses its most critical entry point early discovery. When children no longer have safe, accessible places to play freely, potential athletes remain hidden. There are fewer chances for trained eyes to spot promise. And without early exposure, raw talent fades before it can be refined.
From pipeline to dead end

Several former athletes trace their beginnings to school playgrounds and inter-school competitions sponsored by corporate organisations in the past.

Companies like Shell and Coca-Cola once funded school sports programmes, donated equipment, and sponsored youth games that created a steady pipeline of talent.

Many Nigerian athletes initiated their careers through school sports, developing their talents in local, secondary, and university competitions before reaching international fame.

People like Mary Onyali, Blessing Okagbare, Tobi Amusan and Chidi Imoh all began their journey in school, alongside rising talents discovered in school championship, such as 12-year-old sprinter Abdulaleem Abdulsalam.

Recently, former Nigerian sprinter and veteran Olympian, Mary Onyali called for investment in school sports to harness young athletes.

She noted that school sports remained the best tool for recruiting young athletes to represent Nigeria in international competition, recounting how she started her sport career from school.

Onyali decried the poor attention given to school sports in recent times, stressing the need for massive investment in school sporting infrastructure to harness young talents.

She urged government at all levels and stakeholders to look inward towards discovering athletes from schools.

In the same vein, Former director-general of National Sports Commission (NSC), Al-Hassan Yakmut called for improved budgetary allocation for school sports.

According to him, with good investment in school sports, Nigeria’s future in sports would be better and brighter, adding that there were more talents now than in the past.

Funding promises, empty grounds.

While governments routinely announce commitments to sports development, grassroots funding remains minimal. Budgets often prioritise elite competitions, leaving community facilities and school sports neglected.

He argued that the government’s failure to recognise sports as a serious economic discipline has contributed to the problem. In his view, sports have moved far beyond recreation and fitness, becoming a powerful industry that creates wealth for individuals, families and communities.

Using international examples, he pointed out that major sporting events now generate revenues larger than the budgets of some Nigerian states. He references recent high-profile boxing bouts that earned tens of millions of dollars, noting that such figures show the economic potential of sports when properly structured and supported.

He believed that talent still exists across the country today but lamented that it is often abandoned due to poor follow-up and the politicisation of sports development. He said attention is frequently placed on elite athletes, while the grassroots, where the journey truly begins, remain underfunded.

While acknowledging past government efforts to involve former legends in sports administration, he emphasised that recent policies have focused more on rewarding established athletes than investing in grassroots development. He maintained that without proper financing and structure at the base, such efforts will not produce lasting results.

Edatomola called for a shift in focus towards implementation and inclusion of people who genuinely understand the game.

According to him, Nigeria needs former players and administrators with deep knowledge and genuine commitment to guide the country back to a strong sporting culture built from school playgrounds upward.

A sports analyst, Oluwatoyosi Adamolekun, has emphasised that sports development in Nigeria is often treated as a recreational activity, a “social add-on” to what many consider the more serious sectors of the economy. She said globally, sports is a multi-billion-dollar industry, generating over $500 billion yearly and contributing significantly to employment, tourism, infrastructure development, and media revenue.

She pointed out that discovering and developing young talents in Nigeria is as critical as building refineries to produce oil, because both are avenues for revenue generation. Proper sports facilities in schools, she said, are not just important; they are foundational to talent discovery, national competitiveness, and long-term economic value creation.

Highlighting the structural reality of Nigeria’s youth-heavy population, she said roughly 42 per cent of Nigerians are under 25, making schools the most organised platforms to identify potential talent. “If discovery does not happen there, it becomes accidental, and accidental systems do not build competitive nations. Talent that depends on accident rarely becomes a scalable national capital,” she explained.

Adamolekun emphasised that no athlete emerges from nowhere. Talent requires structure, and structure requires facilities. Functional pitches, courts, gyms, athletics tracks, and trained instructors, she said, are not luxuries; they are the ecosystem that transforms raw ability into competitive skill. Without them, talent remains informal and unrefined.

She described the conditions in many public schools across Nigeria as disheartening. “The football field is dilapidated. The goalposts lean awkwardly. The basketball court has cracks. The athletics track is an open patch of uneven ground. Yet, inside those classrooms sit children with extraordinary potential,” she said.

She added that when young athletes have no pitch to practise, no court for training, and no equipment to practise with, what dies first is not talent but momentum.

“In Nigeria, that’s how many gifts end: not with failure, but with silence,” she emphasised.

Adamolekun pointed out that the consequences are economic as well as athletic. “A gifted child without facilities doesn’t just lose a game; they lose a future that could have employed others. Globally, sport is big business. One reason countries invest early is because the return is not only medals; it’s markets. That’s not the reality in Nigeria.”

She said the decline in extracurricular activities is a reflection of a deeper national problem. “Nigeria is not merely neglecting sports; it is weakening a vital economic pipeline,” she said. Schools, she explained, are Nigeria’s most organised pipeline for youth, yet without proper facilities there is no effective observation or development of talent.

Adamolekun criticised the current government’s approach to grassroots sport, noting that while policies exist, implementation is weak. “No, the current government policies do not support grassroots sport. Nigeria does not lack policy language; it lacks policy execution,” she said.

She highlighted that irregular funding, political vulnerability, and the absence of structured incentives for private-sector participation exacerbate the problem.

She emphasised that funding is only one part of the equation. “Sports without systems rarely produce sustained excellence. To understand why funding is critical, we must break down what youth sports actually requires: facility construction and maintenance, equipment procurement, coaching salaries and certification, medical and physiotherapy support, structured competitions and logistics, talent scouting networks, administrative coordination,” she said.

Adamolekun pointed out that even where government allocations exist, competing priorities dilute consistency. “Without private-sector integration, grassroots sports remain vulnerable to political cycles,” she said, adding that corporate sponsorship could stabilise grassroots development and professionalise administration.

She warned of the long-term consequences of neglecting school sports. “Youth sports does not fail because of talent shortages, it fails because of funding instability. If Nigeria keeps neglecting school sports and grassroots development, the long-term consequences won’t just show up in fewer medals or loss of athletes. They’ll show up in loss of revenue, social stability, and a pipeline of national confidence,” she said.

Adamolekun emphasised that Nigeria, with its vast youth base, should be leading in Africa. “Sports is a soft power that has the capacity to sharpen how the world sees a nation,” she said, stressing the urgent need for structured pathways and proper facilities for young athletes.

The human cost beyond medals.

Beyond the consequences of lost talent, the absence of sports facilities carries deeper social and psychological effects. An Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology at Baze University, Abuja, Dr Dennis Uba, warned that declining youth participation in sports poses serious psychological and developmental risks for Nigeria’s young population.

From a clinical standpoint, he said sport remains one of the most powerful yet underestimated tools in child and adolescent development.

He explained that structured physical activity helps shape brain systems responsible for impulse control, emotional regulation, resilience and executive functioning. Through organised competition and teamwork, he said, young people learn to tolerate frustration, manage failure, cooperate across differences and develop a stable sense of identity.

In a country where over 60 per cent of the population is under 25, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (2023), he said the decline signals more than reduced recreation. “It signals a developmental vulnerability with long-term psychological implications,” he said.

He added that the scarcity of functional sports facilities across public schools and communities further compounds the problem. When playing fields are absent, equipment is inadequate and physical education is treated as expendable, children lose structured environments that nurture discipline, social competence and self-efficacy.

Referencing a 2021 study conducted in Uyo Metropolis by Akpan and Bassey, he said adolescents who participated in school sports demonstrated stronger peer relationships and better behavioural adjustment than those who did not.

Beyond individual development, he said sport serves as one of the few organic platforms capable of fostering unity in Nigeria’s culturally diverse society of over 250 ethnic groups. However, he added that infrastructural decay, excessive academic prioritisation and restrictive gender norms particularly those limiting girls’ participation continue to prevent sport from fulfilling this integrative function.

The consequences, he noted, extend beyond psychology into economics and national stability.

With youth unemployment estimated at over 40 per cent by the National Bureau of Statistics in 2023, he said underdeveloped grassroots sports systems represent a missed opportunity for job creation and industry growth. Investment in sports infrastructure, he added, could stimulate sectors such as media, tourism, health services and facility management, while reducing antisocial behaviour through structured youth engagement.

The critical question, he asked is: “Is it that Nigeria cannot afford to invest in sports infrastructure, or whether it does not want to?”

He stressed that neglecting sport amounts to underinvestment in mental health, social cohesion and economic diversification, while prioritising it would cultivate a generation that is physically capable, psychologically resilient and nationally transformative.