Financiers of relegated Nigeria Professional Football League (NPFL) side, Shooting Stars Sports Club (3SC), the Oyo state government has hinted at a holistic look into the club’s demotion to the second tier of Nigerian football.
The state’s Commissioner for Youth and Sports, Abayomi Oke told www.aclsports.com that government will come up with their position and subsequent roadmap in a matter of days as they look to avert such disappointments in the future.
Oke however cautioned against hasty rationalisations which may lead to improper post-mortem on the team’s performance.
“In a few days, we will come up with the government’s position on the matter,” begun Oke.
“But my advice will be that we shouldn’t do a knee jerk reaction because of the situation and quickly react. We need to look at the whole issues.”
“It goes beyond the ministry. It goes into the personnel, the management, the technicals and finances. What role did everybody play in this season and what roles are they supposed to play going forward. What is the long term solution?”
Shooting Stars have been knocking on the exit door from the elite division in recent years and Oke affirmed that the government, with their upcoming action was now ready to put in place a measure that will take them away from being perennial strugglers.
“We’ve were in this situation last season, thank God we survived it, are we going to be rambling over the same thing every year?” he asked rhetorically.
“We need to take the positives out of it too. Are the boys good enough? If the future is commercialisation or privatisation like everybody is saying, we need to look at it,” he added.
As regards the stage of analysis by his Ministry, Oke says the problem has been categorised into two parts from where they will be working on.
“We are looking at it from the short term and the long term perspective. The short term is to assess what went wrong and prepare ourselves for the NNL.
“The long term is; what is the future of 3SC?”
“If we can get the right materials, the right administrators, the right technical crew, why will it not be achievable? So that’s why we need to look at the long term solutions now and not the temporary.
“The MFM FC that people are celebrating now almost got relegated last season. But because the team has been together for six years, we now see the result of long-term planning,” he concluded.
