The Growing Link Between Football Fandom and Online Gaming

Eric Chelle named his squad on Thursday and most of the country read it on a phone before any television station had it. Twenty-four players for Madagascar in Uyo on 25 September and Guinea-Bissau in Bissau four days later, the list shared, screenshotted and argued over inside an hour, at viewing centres and in family WhatsApp groups alike. The numbers behind it aren’t small. The NCC’s July figures show 195 million active lines and 157 million mobile internet subscriptions, with broadband penetration at 57 per cent. Free-to-air television still leads for live matches, and by some distance: a GeoPoll survey in May found 64 per cent of Nigerian fans watch live football that way, the highest of the five African markets polled. But 43 per cent said they follow games through live updates on social media, and 91 per cent follow the English Premier League, a league played six hours’ flight away. For most of that 91 per cent, the league lives on the phone.

Pay television felt the shift first. MultiChoice has reported shedding subscribers across its African markets outside South Africa, Nigeria among them, and blames inflation. A decoder subscription is a monthly decision. A data bundle can be bought for a day.

The week has a shape

Interest in football isn’t spread evenly across seven days. Saturday belongs to the Premier League, Sunday to the NPFL, Tuesday and Wednesday to European nights when a Nigerian is playing. Monday, Thursday and Friday are quiet unless there is a transfer.

Any app built around football inherits that shape. Its traffic arrives in spikes and falls away. Servers have to be sized for Saturday at four o’clock and paid for on Thursday when hardly anyone opens the thing.

The apps that survive here stay useful in the gaps, and they stay small. After the NCC approved tariff increases capped at 50 per cent in January 2025, a heavy app became an expensive one. The regulator also counted more than 5,000 fibre cuts in the first half of this year, most of them from roadworks, so a stream that can’t recover from a dropped connection gets uninstalled.

The casino tab

The commercial answer, in Nigeria as in Britain, has been to put more than football behind one login. First came prediction games, virtual leagues followed, and by now most of the big apps carry a casino tab as well.

In Lagos, putting a casino tab beside the betting markets isn’t a workaround; it’s the licence category. The Supreme Court ruled in November 2024 that lotteries and games of chance are a matter for the states rather than the federal government, and the Lagos State Lotteries and Gaming Authority’s register carries a combined heading, “online sports betting/online casino”, for operators that do both. The Saturday accumulator, sportsbook and even their online casino games library come under the same licence, with one fee and one monthly gaming tax, and on the phone they come under the same password.

For the operator it’s the same arithmetic that puts a news feed and a payments tab into the airtime app: the servers cost the same on Thursday as on Saturday, so a customer who opens the account on Thursday costs nothing extra.

State by state

The catch is that regulation in Nigeria is now state by state. Lagos publishes its list of licensed operators and updates it; other states run their own lists. There is no national self-exclusion register. So what a fan actually gets depends on the state that issued the licence and on the operator. In the better builds a deposit limit is the account’s limit, full stop, and a time-out logs you out of everything. In the worse ones it closes the casino tab and leaves the rest running.

Waiting on Abuja

A Central Gaming Bill that would put a national framework back over all of this passed the National Assembly last December, and within weeks the President said publicly that he would not sign it. It has not been assented to. Until something replaces it, the link between football and online gaming in Nigeria is being written by state regulators, telecoms pricing and roadworks crews, in roughly that order of influence.

The Super Eagles play Madagascar next Friday. Whatever screen the match itself is on, the line-ups, the goals and the argument will travel the way the squad list did, on the phone.