When Sporting Lagos’ flying winger, Rivio Ayenmwenre, headed his team into the lead against Gombe United at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena on matchday 1 of the 2023/2024 season of the Nigerian Professional Football League, the stadium in Lagos Island was drowned in a cacophony.

Sporting Lagos’ Happy Corner — the primary stand housing the club’s most fervent supporters — broke into a series of chants and songs specially created to celebrate goals by its team. That moment represented an instructive snapshot into a club and community in its ascendancy.

Those moments of elation for fans, and the manic celebration that accompanies them, are among the primary objectives the team’s head coach, Paul Offor, strives for when he leads his team out against opponents at their Onikan home ground.

“There's nothing we can do without the fans,” he tells OkayAfrica over Zoom. “Football is a show. It's like an artist performing. You don't perform for yourself, you perform for people. You need people to come and watch when you are performing. We need the fans. The football we play is for our fans. They are so important to us. Football cannot survive without fans.”

The origins of Sporting Lagos

Founded by tech entrepreneur, Shola Akinlade, in 2022, Sporting Lagos was established to serve as a platform for communal development and social change in Nigeria’s commercial capital. From the very beginning, the club has placed its fans at the center of its ambition to build a multigenerational football club. That decision has been rewarded by an unprecedented level of loyalty and camaraderie among its followers in contemporary Nigerian football.

“We are building a legacy,” David Odunlami, the head of brand storytelling at Sporting Lagos, tells OkayAfrica. “Sporting Lagos is for Lagos and Nigeria. We serve the people, everybody that is interested in football. Men, women, old, young. I always see it from the point of what we are trying to achieve, and what we are trying to achieve is a multi-generational club as we always say. A club that'll outlive us.”

The Sporting Lagos journey has not been all plain sailing. In the club’s first season in the Nigerian National League – the second-tier of football in Nigeria – it nearly suffered relegation, only staying up on goal difference.

Even in those trying periods, the support of fans who trooped to the Mobolaji Johnson Arena to cheer the team on was critical in staving off relegation.

Switching up tactics

A rethink of the club’s approach led to the employment of Offor as coach in the lead-up to the 2022/2023 NNL season, and he was expected to take the team to the Nigerian top flight. “The owner really wanted a Premiership team, because in his words, he said, ‘For everything to come alive, we really need to be promoted,’” Offor says.

To get his team promoted, the coach went about implementing a tactical style that allowed his team to control games. “The idea behind possession is to find an athlete to get to the final leg with control of the ball,” he explains. “We don't just want 'kick and hope' or 'kick and follow.' We want to be able to arrive in the final leg with control, being able to dictate the pace of the game, being able to find the space and the right time to penetrate and score a lot of goals and create excitement for the fans.”

A mix of the excitement that the club generates and its clearly identifiable playing pattern has helped it continue to attract more supporters enamored by the Sporting Lagos process. Chux Odoh, a Lagos-based communications and marketing professional, who grew up watching Bendel Insurance in the old Nigerian first division, says the atmosphere at Sporting Lagos’ home games gives him nostalgia for watching Bendel Insurance play at the Ogbe Stadium in Benin. “I’m getting that same kind of experience where the stadium is full,” he says. “On a typical day at a Sporting Lagos home game, there’s a very enthusiastic supporters’ club that has grown over time. So, we can say it’s a mixture of everybody, all classes of people.”

At half-time of the NPFL match against Gombe United, the club paraded the Super 8 trophy it won in July to a raucous reception. The first trophy in Sporting Lagos’ history arrived after an exciting final against Remo United in July that was played out in front of a packed stadium at the Mobolaji Johnson Arena.

“It was very important for us to win our first trophy,” Offor says. “The most important thing is that we did it, and we were able to do it in our own style, our own way. Playing the way the fans and everybody wanted us to play. The confidence to do that against Enyimba, to do that against Awka United, and to do that back-to-back with Remo Stars, is amazing. It's something that really gave the team that confidence.”

With a new season underway, new goals are being set and the scale of Sporting Lagos’ ambitions continues to grow. For Odoh, he’s keen to see his team test itself against quality opposition in the Nigerian top flight, and looks forward to visiting other grounds with the team. “I want to go to Remo Stars,” he says. “Remo Stars play in Ikenne here. That’s like a one-hour drive from Lagos. That's already being dubbed as the South-West Derby. So, it would be interesting to go and watch those games in Ikenne.”

Not resting on its laurels, the club is keen to improve the experiences of regular match-goers and recently unveiled a number of season-long membership plans designed to make its community feel a sense of ownership in the club. Offor is pragmatic enough to know all of these plans and the club’s continued ambition hinges on his ability to keep propelling his players to new heights.

“My objective and goal is to make sure that we fill the stadium every time we play,” he says. “We cannot fill the stadium every time we play if we are not playing good football and if we are not winning matches. I hope that every time we play at Onikan, we have the stadium filled; we have our fans, everybody supporting us. That is the most important thing for us.”