Ex-Footballer, SEGUN ODEGBAMI Tells City People
In May 2025, football legend Segun Odegbami was appointed Grand Sports Ambassador of Ogun State by Governor Dapo Abiodun—a symbolic move ahead of the Gateway Games 2024. Nicknamed “Mathematical” for his intelligent play, Odegbami rose to fame with Shooting Stars, leading them to multiple league titles and a historic continental victory in 1976. He starred for Nigeria’s Super Eagles, playing a key role in the country’s first AFCON win in 1980.
Off the pitch, he’s a respected columnist, broadcaster, and sports advocate. In 2022, he launched Eagles 7 Sports Radio 103.7 FM to deepen sports discourse in Nigeria. A true statesman of sports, Odegbami now brings his vast experience to drive Ogun State’s sporting ambitions forward.
A few days ago, City People Publisher, Dr. SEYE KEHINDE and Sport Reporter, BENPRINCE EZEH paid the legendary footballer a visit at his home in Abeokuta, where he spoke on why people should look at sports beyond physical activities. Below are the excerpts from the chat.
I’ve had with you before now, you’ve always mentioned sports. Even when we talk football, I can see your preference for sports as a holistic. In the TVC interview you had a few weeks back, you still spoke about sports being a very good vehicle to change society and all of that?
For me, I feel that there’s a need to talk to you again about that and why you keep insisting on that view that sports can be made useful to do a lot of things in society. So I just wanted a little discussion with you on that, on the power of sports for change and all of that. And why this is coming, I don’t want to say late to us in Nigeria, but this is actually another way by which we can hasten or make progress with development and all of that.
I remember I also spoke to you at the time you got the Nigerian Institute of Architects (NIA) appointment and then you spoke about how sports can actually be used for politics and all of that. So I’d like to see if I could get you to talk to us again about sports, especially in view of this last experience. This is what I want and it’s hard for people to see?
You have to shed everything you have thought that you know about sports, you have to shed those things aside and start to look at it differently. You have to look at sports through a totally different prism to understand what it can do beyond sports. When you say sports, everybody just thinks immediately about running, playing football, jumping.
Yeah, that is sports. And that’s the competitive side of the physical activity, organized physical activity that is defined as sports. But then, that physical activity is followed by the whole world?
It is the most followed activity in the world, as it were. Different degrees of followership. Some just worship it. They go and watch others do it. Some do it themselves. Some use it to drive causes. Some use it to drive business. Some use it to drive well-being. So when you look at it like that, you start to see several dimensions of sport and what sport can do. So I always try to look beyond the physical activity itself. I’m not sure, but I think you and I discussed the Amsterdam Arena. Yes, if you recall, the Amsterdam Arena. And that forms a good background for me to introduce the extra dimensions of sport. It covers all aspects of life. The beyond sports covers all aspects of life. It’s about the environment, particularly about the environment. It is about the well-being of the citizens, of the people. If you create an environment, you create and play and exercise and just relax and do your physical works, run and cycle and skate. All of those things are impactful on the well-being of the citizens. Whereas all you did is to provide the environment. If you go to Kenya now, you have so many parks. You go to the capital city, there’s a big park in Nairobi. And when you go to that park in the morning, there are thousands and thousands of young people running through the parks. There are running parks all over the place. They are all running. They are all running. Long distances. So now that you think of it, what does running do for them? It’s health. It helps the general well-being and health of the people. Because a lot of them are running. Exercise is medicine. From amongst them, you have those who are very good, who are talented, gifted. Those ones can pursue as a career. It forms part of the sports tourism in Kenya. So even as we speak now, you can see that we are extending the dimension from environment to well-being of the citizens. To sports as an activity that can impact the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of a country. That can set up a sports tourism economy. And you can just go on and on. So I’m just giving you that example, which is what happens in Amsterdam.
Also another example that I told you yesterday. Amsterdam Arena is just a football ground owned by a football club, Ajax Amsterdam, the biggest club in Holland. That arena is the biggest contributor to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the city of Amsterdam. Whereas it is a club that plays on that ground, they have a football ground, a football club, once every two weeks. And when they play, it lasts four hours. During those four hours, 93,000 people come. They enter the field, they buy drinks, they buy food, they buy tickets, they buy souvenirs. They have, I think, 63, I’m not sure, suites, corporate suites that are all taken by corporate organizations. Anyway, for four hours, the football club generates huge revenue. But you see, the revenue they generate in those four hours is just a small fraction of the revenue generated beyond the four hours. Because the Amsterdam Arena, the sports complex, does not sleep. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year round. And the football is played once every two weeks for four hours. So what happens during the rest of those hours? So that is a study. When you go to the Amsterdam Arena, they advise you to come for three days so that you can go through the whole experience to understand the magnitude of activity, social and economic, that goes on in that sports arena.
The arena, just as we have MKO Arena. Dr. Abiodun changed the name from sports complex to sports arena when I told him the story of Amsterdam Arena. And he understood for the first time the concept. And he told me back that he is an entrepreneur that just listening to what I said now has opened his eyes to endless possibilities and opportunities that can be generated and developed and created within the MKO sports arena to add to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the state. We can create a night economy. We can create a sports economy. We can do so much.
So, the story of the Amsterdam Arena encapsulates everything. Within that arena, you have hospitality facilities everywhere that drives tourism industry. You have health and medical facilities that drive that sector. You have casinos and gambling, betting shops, and all those things that drive another sector. You have all the bars and nightclubs and restaurants and all kinds of things. There is a section there where the organizers hold some of the biggest musical concerts in the world within the arena. If you go through their list of those that have held concerts there, for example, Michael Jackson, Beyoncé — those are the people that go to host concerts there. So, it just goes on. Everything is there. There are hotels, there are banks, there are this, there are that and all of this is driven by Ajax Amsterdam Football Club. It is like Arsenal. Arsenal Football Club is not just the footballers playing. The footballers play. They are playing. But you see, there is an entire global ecosystem. Even in Nigeria, if you check what is expended by Nigerians around that product called Arsenal, in the betting shops, in the drinking parlors, in the restaurants, in the clothing business, it is mind-boggling. But here, it is undocumented. I’m just giving you that as an example.
So, it goes on and on. But it takes understanding. It’s not that even I myself just knew about it. It is the product of my systematic engagements that have opened my eyes to all the endless possibilities, my own experiences.
Now, I look at life through sports and I’m able to do it. If you want to discuss law with me now, I will discuss law with you very easily, but I will take you through my experiences in sports. What does it mean to discuss medicine? I will discuss medicine with you. I’m a champion of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Nigeria Alliance. I am not just a member, I am the ambassador of exercise medicine. Just move and you live longer. I’m just talking of the health sector and so on. There are so many things connected to health. High blood pressure, diabetes, and all those kinds of things that have to do with the heart. I’m a consultant to the Nigerian Heart Foundation. We say it. When Nigeria is playing, when we are competing somewhere, it unites the people. We don’t know Yoruba from Igbo from this. Everybody organizes around the team and then we support the team, which is fantastic. But there’s much more to it than that. That is the least thing that sports does, even for us in Nigeria. But we are not seeing it. We are not examining it. We just say it. Every governor comes in and says it’s a unifying thing. Okay, it’s a unifying thing. What are you doing? Even if it’s for unification. What are you doing to make sure that unification is sustained?
That’s the biggest problem we have in Nigeria, to be one. That’s our biggest struggle. It’s intractable. We don’t know how to do it. How to combine the Yoruba and the Igbo and the Yoruba and the outside cultures and ways of life and this and that. But that’s the tool. Sports is the tool. But we are not using it. We have to start to think deeper than just verbalizing and saying that it’s a unifying force.
I brought five Boko Haram boys to my school. Victims of Boko Haram from Borno State. They had never left their state before. These are Muslims, deep Muslims from the region that says they don’t want Western education. It is forbidden. They sent them out of school and they were wasting at home, just ready to become part of our problems in Nigeria. To be recruited by all these insurgents and so on and so forth. And then we took them from there and brought them to Yoruba land, to the heart of Yoruba land. Reluctantly, their parents forgave them, but we promised them sports. We said, come, we’ll offer them sports and they can become Ahmed Musa. So when we tell them the goal, the objective, they will be rich and famous like your other children.
We bring them here, put them in a school, an institution where they can actually become Ahmed Musa and the rest of them. Still keep their religion. It doesn’t hamper their religion. And then you give them an education. You see, they end up having everything. They are keeping their religion. Their culture is untouched. The benefits they gain in the sports, they now gain Western education. When you look at the lot, the most successful of them are those that have Western education. Buddha, Fulani, all those leaders, they have Western education.
Now you are giving it to these young ones as an experiment. Two and a half years later, these five boys go back to Borno State. Three of them now are serving. They have been there in service. They have graduated. They are still doing their sport. They are still Muslim. They have become leaders in their communities.
So we have the model of what sport can do, not just in unification, but in the cultural, socio-cultural development for our people to show them that you can keep your culture, you can keep your traditions, you can keep your language, you can keep your everything and yet become the best that you can be as a Nigerian. And you can have friendships forever.
Now they have come to the heart of Yoruba land to gain everything they have gained. They loved it. They saw that there was no fight. They were going to their mosques and coming back. And when they even went back, they became better Muslims. So the power of sport is all around us until we open our eyes and embrace it to see it to be wasted like a beautiful flower in the desert.
Everything I’ve said now. When the festival was conceived, it was conceived after the Civil War of 1970 as a unifying tool because we had great leaders at that time. They created the National Sports Festival to accelerate the coming together of the youths of the different parts of the country. It was an ingenious thing. I don’t know where they got the idea from. Probably from Germany. Let’s bring the youths of Nigeria together. Let them spend some time together. Let them compete amongst themselves. The best of them, let us assemble them to represent the country. It was a fantastic vision.
And that’s what they did. Two years after, we did the All Africa Games, which was even bigger. That served as a model, as a test for us that we can do it in Nigeria. We did it in 1973. They brought the youths together. We met in 1973 at the first National Sports Festival. We were all football players from different parts of the country. Cemented by that experience. The evidence is there that it is a unifying tool. That was why it was conceived. It was to discover young talent. Those young talents.
