Sports: Your Excellency, Please, Save Gateway United FC, Sports Pundit, Biodun Alabi Writes Governor Abiodun

Biodun Alabi

ABEOKUTA - Governor Dapo Abiodun, I write this with so much pain in my heart. As someone who knows the history and the path of the Ogun state football team - Gateway United - at least in the last 21 years, it will be a betrayal of passion for me to remain silent as this team is heading for the precipice.

In the last ten years, Gateway United has struggled to get to the Nigeria Professional Football League without success. That is not as bad as in the last two years within which the team has become a terribly bad advertisement for the legendary prowess of Ogun state in all spheres of life.

Last weekend, the team lost scandalously again to an unknown quantity in Nigerian football,  3-0 to Godosky football club!  Similar results had dotted the season. It's shameful, it's tragic that a team that once gave 3sc of Ibadan, Enugu Rangers, Heartland of Owerri and Enyimba of Aba a run for their money has descended to this abysmal level.

Your Excellency, the best Gateway United will achieve this season is retain its National League status. Even with that, without clinical restructuring ahead of next season, the club will go into extinction.

This season, with a relatively competent management team and a decent coaching team, Gateway United has failed to rise to its pedigree, this simply implies something is fundamentally wrong with the whole set up. It requires re-engineering.

Your Excellency, you might find it hard to situate Gateway United in your Rebuilding Ageda policy, but here was a club that brought feel good factor to the Ogun state economy between 2003 and 2011. It made Ogun a Mecca of some sort. The late Rashidi Yekini wore the jersey of this club, Emmanuel Isah, Saani Abacha, Rabiu Ibrahim and many more.  This team was at the biggest football business expo- Soccerex in 2009 in South Africa, the only from Nigeria!

It built and watered its own economy inside the M.K.O Abiola stadium at Kuto, Abeokuta with its multiplying effects on the larger economy. It was almost a movement.

Your Excellency, please pay attention to this team now, bring it back to reckoning. You will write history with this.

BIODUN ALABI