Oluwagbenga Kolawole
The Zik Hall League is underway, and to this end, it is important to inform you of some necessary details about the competition.
The Zik Hall league started as an initiative of the erstwhile sports minister, Ayobami Ojeniyi. However, it is not entirely new. It was promised during Jay Kareem's tenure as Zik Sport minister, but it was not quite successfully executed.
Ayobami Ojeniyi's Zik Hall League execution had a lot more planning and structuring. To effectively handle the operation of the league as well as other footballing activities in the hall, the Zik Football Association (FA) was created. It automatically became a subcommittee of the sport committee of the hall.
The tournament is a five-a-side football competition held at the Zik Hall Maracana. Each half lasts 15 minutes with a five-minute interval. The team with the most goals in a match gets the three points; the losing team gets none. In the case of a draw, both teams get one point each.
The competition is in a league format with ten teams playing each other twice. And a total of 90 matches will be played throughout the competition. A team must have a team owner, a manager and twelve players, a minimum of whom must be six Zikites.
This session's edition has some new clubs and new faces.
First is the Da-ebs football team owned by Umar Adegoke; then there is The Incredibles FC, a team consisting primarily of 200-level students which is owned by Oke Idunnuoluwanimi. Others are the Oyebanji Gideon-owned Alma Guerrero FC, the Otunla Samuel-owned Masterclass FC, the Kolawole Ayooluwa-owned Vanguard FC, and the Oyewumi Temiloluwa-owned Indispensables FC.
Bluelock FC, which participated in the last edition, was acquired in the middle of the season last session by Ifeoluwa Farayola, a graduate of OAU who bought it for forty thousand naira.
Clubs that participated in the last edition of the Zik Hall league, Bluelock, Blaze, and Vanguard, as well as Youngboys, are returning for this session's edition.
If a player gets a red card, he is sent off for five minutes and is then replaced by another player when that five minutes ends.
As the competition is a winner-takes-all, the winning team goes home with one hundred thousand naira in cash.
According to the rule book, once a player gets four yellow cards, that player misses the next match. And on the occasion where a player or manager gets two consecutive reds, such player or manager misses the next match.
According to the FA chairman, Benjamin Obasola, the league is scheduled to run for 28 weeks till around October 2025.
He further revealed that the first half of the season will end a week before GST exams to allow players enough time to catch up on academic work.
You can read more in our interview with the FA chairman here.
