Our structure can feed all Nigerian teams with quality stars, says Akinbobola

Chairman of the Ondo State Football Agency Sunshine (ODSFA), Akinsola Elvis Akinbobola, is one of the bright young men, whose ambition is to create a new direction for Nigerian football. A member of the League Management Company (LMC), the body responsible for the organising and managing the Nigeria Professional Football League, Akinbobola has within a short time as the leader of the ODSFA, created an organisation that has transformed football in the south west region, with some of the products of the agency in clubs across the country.

Aside being the president of Sunshine Stars, which currently sits second on the Glo Nigeria Premier League table, Akinbobola is also in charge of Sunshine Queens, which is one of the best run women football teams in the country. ODSFA also has an academy, which responsibility is to make stars out of the numerous young talents in the state ad its environs.

Already, some of the products of the academy have started playing professional football for clubs across the country. But like a perfectionist, Akinbobola is not yet satisfied with the current performance of the ODSFA. In fact, he says he will only feel fulfilled when every team in Nigeria and most big teams in the world have products of the agency among their playing staff.

Speaking to The Guardian in Akure recently, Akinbobola says his agency is close to getting to the target set by the Ondo State Governor, Olusegun Mimiko, adding that the recent position of Sunshine Stars on the league table testifies that the programme has started yielding fruits.

According to Akinbobola, “Last season, our concentration was on restructuring the team and re-engineering it to meet the vision of our governor. When we came in, the first thing we had to do was to put the administrative structure in place and professionalise the club.

“Restructuring a club is not something you do in a hurry, so it took us a year to get our bearing and now we have gotten to a situation where we have started working on the club to ensure it attains the heights expected of it. So, our concentration is now on the team more than the structure of administration.
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Actually, our job is to put up well-articulated structures such that even when Mr. Governor leaves office, whoever comes will see a solid foundation to work on. We have almost completed the restructuring. What is left is to see that our teams excel. We have also started working on that.

“You can see that the two major teams are doing well in the league. Our academy has started producing quality players. Some of them are in Sunshine Stars team; a few have joined other teams. Tunde Adeniji, who is in Sunshine Stars’ main team, was three years ago in our youth team. That is our governor’s dream; to discover young talents, nurture them and develop them to become stars. That is our project and we hope that before the end of our governor’s tenure, we would have succeeded an actualizing that dream.”

Akinbobola is enthused by Governor Mimiko’s dream of exposing young talents to professional football, adding, “I can say that so far we have done very well.

“The last time Mr. Governor saw me at a meeting he was so glad he called me Mr. Football and said we were doing well. That was a tonic for one.

“Unfortunately, the resources are scarce, but we will continue working with the available fund to ensure we meet our governor’s expectation.”

One of the avenues the ODSFA employ in exposing its products to competitive football is the Mimiko U-18 International Soccer Tournament (MISTON), which involves youth clubs from across the country and the West Africa sub-region.

The competition, according to Akinbobola, apart from exposing the young stars to on-field atmosphere, also helps ODSFA to gauge the development of the players in its academy.

The MISTON tournament, which did not hold last year due to the Ebola scourge in some West African countries, according to Akinbobola, will return this year.

‘‘We had teams from West Africa that indicated interest in the competition, but we could not endanger the lives of our children when the Ebola scourge was ravaging the region.

“Fortunately, Liberia has been declared Ebola free by the WHO and now we plan to hold the competition around September/October,” he said.