We didn’t neglect Abisola Fakiyesi – Naija Ratels president Paul Edeh

By Saheed Afolabi

The founder of Naija Ratels, Barrister Paul Edeh has revealed that Abisola Fakiyesi wasn’t neglected by the club following her injury claim.

Fakiyesi made known her injury impasse to the public through social media on X where she narrated her ordeal with injury and how Naija Ratels abandoned her to her fate.

Explaining his version of the episode, Edeh said he knew Fakiyesi through coach Bankole and players welfare are paramount to him including their education, stressing he wasn’t aware of the injury claims by Fakiyesi and only got to know through her viral post on X (Twitter).

He further disclosed that he wasn’t even aware of the WhatsApp message sent by the player because he only responds more to the club’s WhatsApp group where issues concerning the club are discussed regularly, while

“I think my first knowledge of her was about two years ago, when Coach Bankole approached me and said that he is from Ekiti and that he doesn’t have any player he has given birth to from his own state and that he has this player that was introduced to him from an academy,” Edeh told Prompt News.

“If we can sign her in for him to train her and see if she can be fit for the league and indeed I granted that approval and she joined the team and continued with the training. First, let me sympathise with her situation, because as a founder of the team.

“One thing that I pride myself of is the fact that there are four cardinal areas that as a club when I founded the team I anchor it around, first is the welfare of the players, the skills of the players; that is ensuring that they get well trained, the third is health and the fourth is education. To the best of my ability, I believe we have implemented these as much as we can.

“Indeed I became aware of her case just about three to four days ago when someone drew my attention to what she wrote on X (Twitter), I think it was a snapshot that was forwarded to me, I immediately forwarded it to coach Bankole (Also live on TV) and asked what happened to Fakiyesi that I’m hearing and he gave me a narrative about what happened and immediately, I asked him to contact her about what really went wrong because I wasn’t aware.

“She mentioned that she sent a message to me, that message I didn’t see it. What I did is I created a WhatsApp platform for all players and the coaches and the reason is for ease of communication and there is no message that they have sent on that platform that I’m not aware of, infact when she had the injury and her transition to even Makurdi, all was managed by management staff led by coach Bankole.

“I was not brought into the picture of this, the coach is here he can attest to that fact.”

Established in 2019, Naija Ratels recently signed Nigeria captain, Onome Ebi in the summer and the club have maintained their Premiership status in the NWFL.