Emmanuel Osahon started a grassroots football programme on a school pitch in Mushin, Lagos, and produced Asisat Oshoala and Rasheedat Ajibade. Now he is saying FC Robo Queens will win the NWFL Premiership title in 2026/27. When this man sets a target, Nigerian women’s football pays attention.
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Emmanuel Osahon does not speak in headlines for the sake of it. The founder and head coach of FC Robo Queens is the kind of figure Nigerian women’s football holds in quiet but deep regard the man who built a grassroots programme from scratch at Bishop Aggey Memorial Grammar School in the Mushin area of Lagos and turned it into one of the most productive player development pathways the country has ever seen. When Osahon declares that Robo Queens will win the 2026/27 NWFL Premiership title, it carries a different weight than most coaches making off season promises.
“You have not seen our best at all,” he said in the aftermath of Robo Queens’ sixth-place finish in the Super Six playoff in Port Harcourt. “The same thing happened last season when we missed the Super Six ticket on the final day. We went back, corrected our mistakes and this year we made it. We have upcoming players. This competition has been a huge lesson. We have a lot to take home and improve ahead of next season.” Women’s football fans backing Robo Queens’ title challenge next season and following the NWFL can check the Bet9ja promo code for domestic league markets ahead of the 2026/27 campaign.
Perspective on the Super Six Finish
Finishing sixth in the Super Six carries context that the raw position does not convey. Robo Queens qualified for the playoff for the first time in two seasons, ending what Osahon himself acknowledged had been a painful miss on the final day of the previous campaign. Getting there at all represented progress. Once in Port Harcourt, they went unbeaten in two of their five matches, including a 1-1 draw with Abia Angels on the final matchday that showed genuine competitive quality against a side that had pushed hard for the title throughout the playoff. Their Player of the Season, midfielder Oluwakemi Adegbuyi, scored 11 goals across the campaign — three in the Super Six alone and has since been recognised as the best individual performer in the NWFL for 2025/26. This was not a team that capitulated when it reached the big stage. It was a team that learned from it.
Osahon’s one pointed observation about the competition itself was measured and constructive. “I believe it should be played on neutral ground,” he said, a view that reflects the competitive disadvantage of facing title rivals who play their Super Six matches in familiar regional strongholds. It is a fair point and one that the NWFL has faced calls to address from multiple quarters, though it is also a complaint that speaks to how seriously Robo Queens are now taking their position among the league’s elite clubs. NWFL supporters wanting to follow Robo Queens and other leading clubs through the 2026/27 season can get started with the Bet9ja YOHAIG welcome offer before the new campaign kicks off.
The Man Behind the Club
The story of Emmanuel Osahon is inseparable from the story of Nigerian women’s football over the past two decades. He began his grassroots initiative at Bishop Aggey Memorial Grammar School in Mushin a community in Lagos State not historically associated with women’s football infrastructure or elite talent pathways. From that modest starting point, he built a pipeline that has produced some of the most decorated Nigerian women’s footballers of the modern era. Asisat Oshoala, the six time African Women’s Player of the Year and Barcelona forward, passed through Osahon’s programme. Rasheedat Ajibade, the Ajax and Super Falcons midfielder who has become one of West Africa’s most recognisable women’s footballers, is another direct product of the same grassroots system. Both players have spoken publicly about the role Osahon played in their early development.
That legacy gives his statements about Robo Queens’ future a credibility that goes beyond the ambition of a single club. When Osahon identifies “upcoming players” as the foundation of the 2026/27 challenge, he is speaking from a track record of actually knowing what emerging talent looks like and of having turned it into something remarkable before. What he built in Mushin was not an accident. It was the product of a specific vision about how to find and develop young women footballers in Nigeria, applied consistently over many years. Nigerian football fans who want to support the clubs and coaches building the next generation can register with the Bet9ja platform to follow domestic women’s football through the new season.
The 2026/27 Challenge
Winning the NWFL Premiership is a significant step up from what Robo Queens achieved in 2025/26. Edo Queens are the reigning champions and have won the title twice in three years under Moses Aduku, building a squad with genuine depth and the continental ambition that comes with WAFU-B qualification. Rivers Angels, Nasarawa Amazons, and Bayelsa Queens are all competitive forces with their own aspirations for the new season. Robo Queens will need to improve on a fourth place Super Six finish and translate Osahon’s grassroots pipeline into the kind of consistent, week to week output that NWFL title races demand across a full campaign.
But Osahon has done this before, quietly and without the resources available to some of his rivals. The club he has built from a Mushin school pitch now has a Player of the Season, a Super Six appearance, and a coach telling anyone who will listen that next year they come for the title. In Nigerian women’s football, there are very few people better placed than Emmanuel Osahon to make that promise mean something.
📌 Did You Know?
- Asisat Oshoala, the six time African Women’s Player of the Year and Barcelona forward, is among the most celebrated products of Emmanuel Osahon’s grassroots programme at Bishop Aggey Memorial Grammar School in Mushin, Lagos.
- Rasheedat Ajibade, the Ajax and Super Falcons midfielder who has represented Nigeria at multiple FIFA Women’s World Cups, is another direct product of Osahon’s youth development system one of the most remarkable talent pipelines in Nigerian football at any level.
- FC Robo Queens’ midfielder Oluwakemi Adegbuyi was named the 2025/26 NWFL Premiership Player of the Season after scoring 11 goals across the campaign, including three in the Super Six playoff in Port Harcourt.
- Robo Queens finished sixth in the 2025/26 NWFL Super Six the maximum prestige playoff involving the top six clubs from the regular season conference phase having qualified for the Super Six for the first time after missing it on the final day the previous season.
- Emmanuel Osahon began his grassroots football initiative at Bishop Aggey Memorial Grammar School in Mushin, a densely populated area of Lagos State that had no established tradition of elite women’s football development before Osahon created one there.
- Edo Queens, the 2025/26 NWFL Premiership champions, have now won two titles in three years under coach Moses Aduku, making them the benchmark Robo Queens and every other NWFL club must measure themselves against heading into 2026/27.
- FC Robo Queens are one of Lagos State’s most prominent women’s football clubs and have historically served as a supplier of technically gifted players to the Super Falcons youth setups, a role closely tied to Osahon’s reputation as one of Nigeria’s most trusted women’s football talent developers.
