Adeyemi Adesanya

You are organizing an All Legends Game to celebrate the 1994 and 1996 teams that won continental and global honours and you decided to sideline radio? The same radio that possesses the core demography of your target audience. That is not a mistake. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of who you are celebrating, and who you are celebrating for. Let us be honest about who the 1994 and 1996 legends belong to. They do not belong to TikTok. They do not belong to Instagram Reels. They do not belong to the Gen Zs who were not even born when Kanu Nwankwo was lifting Nigeria at Atlanta '96, when Jay-Jay Okocha was making the whole world fall in love with Nigerian football. The 1994 and 1996 legends belong to a generation that grew up listening to football on radio. To the men and women who sat around transistor radios in markets, in motor parks, in barber shops, in offices, in villages without television, listening to Ernest Okonkwo and other great commentators bring the Super Eagles to life with words alone. That generation is your core audience. They are the ones who will buy tickets if you must sell tickets... They are the ones who will bring their children to say, "This is the man I told you about." They are the ones who will fill a stadium out of nostalgia, out of pride, out of love. But you ignored them. Influencers are great but you need to also balance that out by being intentional about electronic media especially Radio..Posting on social media alone will never fill the stadium. Radio is intimate. Radio is trusted. Radio is local. When a respected OAP in Lagos, Ibadan, Enugu, Kano, Port Harcourt, or Abuja talks about an event for two weeks, every morning, every evening drive-time, it enters people's homes. It enters their cars. It enters their consciousness. It becomes a conversation in the market. It becomes: "Are you going? Let's go together." That is how you sell a legends game. After seeing low turnout in ticket sales, they started giving out free tickets a few days before the main event, and still the turnout was low. That tells you everything. Free tickets could not save you because the problem was never price. The problem was awareness. The problem was connection. The problem was trust. You cannot give...for free what people do not even know exists. You cannot dash people tickets to an event they have no emotional attachment to because you never spoke to them in the language and on the platform they trust. Putting this event together is a beautiful idea. Celebrating 1994 and 1996 is a national treasure. Those teams gave Nigeria its greatest football identity. They deserve a full stadium. They deserve a standing ovation. They deserve to walk out and see a generation that still remembers. But that wasn't the case...because you wanted to look modern instead of being effective. You wanted to look digital instead of being strategic. You confused noise on social media with real mobilization on the ground. Next time, if there is a next time, do it right: Go back to radio. Go back to the streets. Go back to the sports shows, the phone-in programmes, the market activations, the community engagement. Let the legends themselves go on radio and tell their stories. Let the people hear their voices again. That is what will fill the stadium. From my knowledge Only Nigeria info got to talk about that event and that was because my boss decided to have them on board late on. Legends are not made on Instagram. Legends are made in the hearts of the people. And in Nigeria, the road to the people's hearts still passes through radio.... which is still the most accessible electronic media platform to the masses You can sell out a Davido concert on social media but you may not sell out an All Legends Game on social media...the demography is different. It behoves on you planning an event to understand what you want to achieve and the best way to achieve it by reaching the target audience required to drive your event