Nigeria Women’s Football League reels out plans to drive spectators to stadiums

By Oyediji Oluwaseun Babatunde

The Chairperson of the Nigeria Women’s Football League (NWFL), Nkechi Obi says the league will use online content to attract massive audience to the stadiums.

Women’s football audience and viewership are increasing daily with the number of spectators across the globe rising in church laying credence to the development of the game.

The NWFL wants to leverage this via video highlights and players generated content which according to the league will attract people to the stadium to watch 90 minutes of women’s football games.

She stated this while fielding questions from journalists during a press briefing in Abuja to share updates on their achievements since her inauguration six weeks ago.

“So the first answer is that I’m going to ask everyone here. If you had watched a women’s club football, that is, you woke up and tuned into a match Arsenal playing Chelsea Ladies or Lyon playing Barcelona? Watched the whole 90 minutes?” She opined.

“What did they do? What they did was to provide you with short video content that enabled you to know what happened. Because you see, what they’re trying to do is to drive pilots and ensure the best and purpose that the audience in the stadium is there. So that was why Barcelona’s 91,000 audience made history.

“Our goal is to use social media, short video content, player-generated content to drive audiences first to our stadiums. Why? Because we need to build the experience. The experience is what you get when the stadium is buzzing. The experience is what you get when people can come to the stadium and have a quality time.”

Major women’s leagues in Europe livestream their games apart from the English Women’s Super League (WSL) with television rights given to broadcasters as promises an improved visibility for NWFL Premiership.

“And we’re not promising you English Premier League standard time,” she continued.

“We are not promising you men’s premiership standard but what we will do is to at least up the level. So our first goal is to create the onsite audience using short media content, using player generator content, using social media, and using highlights release when we have built it.

“If you look at the operation, you will see the target audience is 1 Million  people in our stadiums. When we achieve 1 Million and above, then it will become the product that people would not mind sitting down and watching 90 minutes of.

“We are not going to receive our turns so that anyone will sit down and watch 90 minutes of a local league match. So the cost of putting our matches on TV would be better deployed in driving audiences to the stadium where we get the product to be needed, which is we have other statements than it is the TV companies we call it. In this concept, people can help clubs, and  audiences to their matches.”

For clubs, she asserted that they will have to market their matches in a bid to also drive fans to the stadium.

“Then they [clubs] need to see value. They only need to market their matches because they can tell people I get 10,000 people in the stadium. So the audience at the stadium is critical to our development. That’s why we say development will be,” she concluded.

According to the board, the new season will  kick off in November 2023, exactly one month to the date of the body’s Annual General Assembly.