Shooting Stars vs Sfaxien exposed the uncomfortable distance between Nigerian football and its fans

The stadium was not empty, but it looked empty.

That was the first thing that struck me at the MKO Abiola Stadium on Saturday evening.

There were Shooting Stars supporters in the stands, concentrated in one section that appeared to fill perhaps 30 per cent of the stadium’s capacity. There were no visible travelling supporters from Tunisia to add to the atmosphere. For a club returning to continental football after 27 years, the scene felt strangely muted.

But then I heard the horn.

From where I sat, however, the size of the crowd did not tell the whole story. A long, brightly coloured plastic horn kept producing its loud, monotonous buzz from the Shooting Stars section, a sound almost disproportionate to the number of people making it. The supporters sang, shouted and waited for their team to produce a moment worthy of the occasion.

When Lucky Emmanuel scored, that moment arrived. The reaction was immediate. The supporters erupted, celebrating a goal that carried more significance than the scoreline suggested: it was Shooting Stars’ first continental goal in 27 years.

For a few moments, the empty seats became irrelevant. What happened in that small section was, in many ways, a better representation of Nigerian football than the empty sections surrounding it.

Those supporters had not simply wandered into the stadium. They had travelled from Ibadan.

Six buses, one club and supporters who paid their own way

One of them, Prophet Joas Adeseko, told me that the supporters had brought six large buses from Ibadan, alongside smaller buses and cars, and had paid for the journey themselves. According to Adeseko, one of the larger buses cost almost ₦120,000, while the smaller buses cost around ₦60,000 each. Nobody had paid them to come, and nobody had guaranteed that the stadium would be full. They came because they love Shooting Stars.

“It is not the board that gave us the money; we spent our own money,” Adeseko told me. “We did not look to the board or anybody for it.”

He has followed Shooting Stars for decades, he said, and even though he comes from Kwara State, where he has been recognised as a supporter of Kwara United, his allegiance remains with the Ibadan club. “When we are going to Kwara to play against Kwara United, I will still follow Shooting Stars to Kwara,” he said, before adding the line that perhaps best explained what I was watching: “As far as I am concerned, I see them as my own. They are like my son. They are like a daughter to me. This club… is my heart. It is my blood. It is my soul.”

Adeseko’s words are difficult to reconcile with the familiar claim that Nigerians simply do not care about domestic football.

The empty seats suggested indifference. His six buses suggested something else.

Perhaps the problem is not that Nigerians have stopped caring. Perhaps Nigerian football has stopped giving that care somewhere to go.

Nigeria does not lack football supporters. We fill viewing centres for Premier League matches, debate Arsenal and Manchester United as if their boardrooms were in Lagos, buy foreign club shirts and organise our weekends around matches played thousands of kilometres away.

So the question is not whether Nigerians love football. It is why so little of that love reaches Nigerian stadiums.

Shooting Stars were not even playing in their traditional home. The club is based in Ibadan and normally plays at Lekan Salami Stadium, but the condition of the pitch has made the ground unsuitable for a continental fixture. That forced the club to take its African campaign to Abeokuta, meaning that supporters who wanted to see their team play an important home match first had to leave their actual home. They came anyway. That is why the empty stadium should not be read simply as evidence of an uninterested fan base.

If anything, the six buses from Ibadan expose the opposite problem. The passion exists; the connection does not.

There are supporters willing to spend ₦120,000 on a bus to follow their club, yet not enough people around the stadium doing the same. Nigerian football has spent years asking why fans are not coming. Perhaps it should ask a different question:

What is it doing to make them want to come?

A football match is not simply 90 minutes between two teams.

It is the journey to the stadium, the colours in the stands, the noise before kick-off, the people you meet, the anticipation of a goal and the feeling that something is happening around you.

That experience is particularly important for domestic football because Nigerian clubs are competing for attention in a market where supporters can consume the world’s biggest leagues from their phones and television screens. Nigerian clubs cannot compete with the Premier League or Champions League by asking people to choose local football out of patriotism. They have to give supporters an experience worth choosing.

That starts with things that sound mundane but are fundamental: reliable fixtures, playable pitches, accessible stadiums, proper promotion and organised supporters. The match itself has to feel like an occasion.

You cannot build a football culture if the pitch is unplayable, the venue keeps changing, the fixture is poorly promoted and supporters only hear about the game after it has already happened.

Shooting Stars’ situation is a perfect example of how difficult that can be. The club has one of the richest histories in Nigerian football, yet it cannot currently use its traditional home for an important continental fixture because of the playing surface, and the consequence is more than a logistical inconvenience. It weakens the connection between club and community. A club’s home is part of its identity, and Lekan Salami Stadium is part of the memory of the club, its history, and the relationship between the team and Ibadan. Move the game elsewhere and supporters are being asked to recreate that connection in another city. Some will. Many will not, and that was visible in Abeokuta.

The city had the privilege of hosting an important continental fixture involving one of Nigeria’s historic clubs, yet there was little evidence that the wider community had embraced the occasion. I cannot claim that Abeokuta does not love football; that would be too broad a conclusion from one evening. But inside the stadium, there was little visible sign that Shooting Stars had become part of the city’s football consciousness. That is another challenge Nigerian football has to confront.

A football club playing in a city should not feel like an administrative event. It should feel like a local event.

Clubs need communities, and communities need clubs.

Free entry, on its own, cannot create that connection. Shooting Stars’ match was free, yet the stadium remained far from full. That should tell us something. Price matters, but it is not the whole story.

People paid to travel from Ibadan. They paid for buses. They gave up their time.

What they were paying for was not admission to a stadium. They were paying to feel close to their club.

That contrast stayed with me.

A Nigerian can passionately follow a club in London without ever visiting England, know its players, buy its shirt and organise weekends around its matches. Yet a historic Nigerian club can play an important continental fixture a few hours away and struggle to fill a 10,000-capacity stadium.

I have watched Shooting Stars play at Lekan Salami Stadium twice, and Saturday’s crowd in Abeokuta was noticeably sparse by comparison. The unusual circumstances of the fixture must be acknowledged, particularly because the club was playing away from Ibadan. But that explanation should not become an excuse. The six buses should tell us something too. They tell us that distance is not an absolute barrier when people feel strongly enough about their club. They tell us that supporters will spend their own money when the occasion matters to them. They tell us that the passion is still alive, and the question Nigerian football should be asking is why there were six buses, rather than sixty.

On Saturday night, Shooting Stars returned to Africa after 27 years and scored a continental goal for the first time in nearly three decades. The supporters who travelled from Ibadan understood what the occasion meant. They brought their jerseys, their voices, their money, and their devotion with them.

Perhaps Nigerian football should begin its search for the fans it thinks it has lost there.

Instead of looking at the empty seats and asking where the fans have gone, it should look at the people who filled that small section and ask how to bring more of them along.

They have not disappeared.

They are still travelling.

They are still paying.

They are still singing.

And somewhere in that section, someone is still blowing that ridiculous, beautiful horn.

Shooting Stars now turn their attention to the second leg against CS Sfaxien; follow the CAF Confederation Cup first round fixtures official CAF website and results via our live scores page.