Sunday Oliseh has issued a direct challenge to NPFL clubs, saying that players who are not paid properly cannot be expected to turn down opportunities abroad, and that the league’s talent drain will continue until wages improve.
Sunday Oliseh has had enough of watching Nigeria’s domestic league lose talented players to financial frustration. Speaking on Brila FM, the former Super Eagles captain did not mince words about the root cause of the country’s deepening talent exodus, placing the responsibility squarely at the feet of NPFL club administrators.
“Football is a business,” Oliseh said. “It’s what he uses to pay his bills, feed his family, plan his future.” His argument was simple and unanswerable: a player who cannot feed his family from his NPFL salary will always look elsewhere, and blaming him for doing so is both unfair and self-defeating for the league as a whole.
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The Consistency Argument Oliseh Makes From Personal Experience
What gave Oliseh’s comments particular weight was the personal dimension. He did not speak as an outside observer passing judgment on a broken system. He spoke as someone who lived through what a functioning payment structure feels like and understands exactly what its absence does to a player’s psychology.
“When we were playing, there was never one month that they owed us. It might be small, but we were paid on time,” he said. “People built families with that money through consistent savings.”
That consistency, Oliseh argued, is the entire point. A player who knows his salary is coming at the end of the month can plan, save, and commit to a club. A player who does not know when or whether he will be paid cannot do any of those things, and the uncertainty itself becomes a reason to leave.
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The Numbers Behind The Crisis
Oliseh’s frustration does not exist in isolation. The structural pay problem in the NPFL has been documented extensively and has drawn repeated pledges from league management that have yet to fully translate into on-the-ground change. The NPFL’s own minimum wage benchmark stood at N150,000 per month at the time NPFL Chairman Gbenga Elegbeleye pledged an upward review heading into the 2025-26 season, yet reports indicated that some clubs were still paying below even that modest floor.
To put that figure in context, analysis of the 2025-26 NPFL season shows that top players at well-funded clubs like Rivers United earn between N800,000 and N1.5 million per month, while bench players and younger squad members at smaller clubs sit closer to the N150,000 minimum. At the other end of the scale, a Nigerian player in Europe’s top five leagues earns between 35 and 40 times that amount annually, a gap so large that no amount of patriotism or league loyalty can reliably close it.
The situation has even attracted FIFA’s attention. In October 2025, FIFA’s Disciplinary Committee handed Heartland FC a transfer ban after the Owerri-based club failed to settle outstanding salary obligations to a foreign player despite multiple payment deadlines issued by world football’s governing body. It was a public embarrassment that underlined how the salary problem is not merely a domestic inconvenience but a reputational issue for Nigerian football internationally.
Oliseh’s Plea To Clubs: Put Yourself In Their Shoes
The former Borussia Dortmund and Juventus midfielder closed his argument with a line that captured the human cost behind the policy debate. “Don’t blame people for trying to feed their family. Put them in your shoes. If you don’t feed your wife, she will complain,” Oliseh said.
His point was not that players should be coddled or that ambition should be penalised. It was the opposite: that a league serious about keeping its best players has to create conditions where staying makes financial sense. Paying consistently, even modest sums, builds loyalty in a way that delayed or withheld wages never can.
“If you want players to stay in Nigeria, ensure the league is conducive and okay,” he added, offering a straightforward prescription that the NPFL has been circling around for years without fully committing to.
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A Familiar Voice On A Long-Running Problem
Oliseh has been one of Nigerian football’s most consistent voices on structural reform. Since hanging up his boots and later serving stints as Super Eagles head coach and in various development roles, he has repeatedly returned to the theme of player welfare as the missing link in the NPFL’s development. His credibility on the subject comes not from theory but from having played at the highest level in Europe and witnessed firsthand the professional standards that Nigerian clubs have struggled to replicate at home.
The irony is that the NPFL is, right now, producing players of genuine European-level quality. The 2025-26 season has thrown up multiple stories of NPFL graduates earning international recognition, while the league’s final day on May 24 carries more drama than almost any comparable matchday in recent memory, with the title race between Enugu Rangers and Rivers United and a five-club relegation battle all to be settled simultaneously. The league has the stories. The question Oliseh is raising is whether it can build the financial environment to retain the talent that generates them.
As reported by FootballInNigeria.com.ng, the conversation around player welfare in Nigeria’s domestic game has grown louder throughout the 2025-26 season, with multiple voices from inside and outside the league calling for a structural overhaul before the next campaign begins.
📌 Did You Know?
- Sunday Oliseh is widely regarded as one of the finest midfielders Nigeria has ever produced. He scored one of the tournament’s most celebrated goals at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, a long-range strike against Brazil that helped the Super Eagles win gold.
- Oliseh played for Borussia Dortmund, Juventus, and Ajax during his European career, giving him direct experience of the professional salary structures that NPFL clubs have long failed to match domestically.
- He was appointed Super Eagles head coach in July 2015 and guided Nigeria through early AFCON 2017 qualifying before resigning in February 2016 amid reports of friction with senior players, including John Obi Mikel.
- The NPFL minimum wage benchmark of N150,000 per month was set several years ago. At current exchange rates, that figure equates to roughly $90 to $100 per month, a fraction of what players in comparable African leagues in Egypt and South Africa earn.
- Heartland FC received a FIFA transfer ban in October 2025 after failing to settle outstanding salary obligations to a foreign player, one of the most high-profile examples of the NPFL’s ongoing payment compliance problem at the international level.
- NPFL Chairman Gbenga Elegbeleye publicly pledged an upward review of player minimum wages heading into the 2025-26 season, a commitment that came after his own admission that some clubs were paying below the existing N150,000 floor.
- The pay gap between the NPFL and Europe’s top five leagues is among the widest of any major footballing nation on the continent. Analysis of the 2025-26 season shows that even top-earning NPFL players take home between 35 and 40 times less per year than their Nigerian counterparts based in the Premier League or Bundesliga.
