Chisom Mbonu-Ezeoke is popularly called “the football girl” among her friends in Enugu, where she spent most of her life, even though she’s from Nnewi, Anambra State, Nigeria. She is the first and longest-serving female soccer analyst and presenter as well as the host of SuperPicks for SuperSport Nigeria, a network she watched and dreamed of working for one day and today, she has spent over two decades as a sports presenter there.
She is an advocate for gender equality in sports and has won many awards she is the first female FIFA licensed football agent in the country and also a Confederation of African Football, CAF Women’s Football Committee member.
In 2017, Ezeoke was one of the recipients of the Global Sports Mentoring Program, GSMP, and went on to be picked from her class to mentor the 2018 Class of the GSMP in Washington DC.
She has a BA. Hons. in English Language, graduating from the University of Abuja. She is the co-founder of Fortem Inspire program – a project that uses sport as a tool to promote education, leadership skills and a healthy lifestyle for young girls.
After finishing her school, she worked three years in sales and marketing before hearing about the FIFA agent licensing program. After some research, Ezeoke learned that no Nigerian woman was licensed to represent the country’s players at the time. In the testing room, she was the only woman in a room of 15 men. And, she passed.
“I wasn’t interested in selling players,” Ezeoke says. “I just wanted to be noticed. It was a way of getting my foot in the door., she told GSMP in an interview.” Soon afterward, she traveled to watch Nigeria’s men’s national soccer team play an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier in Abuja.
Once there, she was invited to dinner, where she unexpectedly met the head of SuperSport Nigeria one of the country’s largest media outlets covering professional soccer.
After their meeting, she got a phone call from her now boss with surprising news. He said “The head the head of SuperSport was so impressed; he’d never met a girl so passionate about football,” she says. “They wanted me to come in for an audition.”
“The audition was a success and I was hired as the first female soccer analyst on the SuperSport network”, Ezeoke said. After two years as an analyst and basketball presenter, she began anchoring coverage of Spain’s La Liga and the English Premier League. A decade later, she remains the only female anchor for SuperSport Nigeria.
“Now I’m a leader and an influencer but initially, people thought I was wasting my time and should pursue something else. And, I say, yes, doctors and teachers are very important. However many kids in Nigeria cannot afford school or the hospital. Imagine if they could use sports to receive an education and create better lives for themselves,” she said.
According to her, witnessing inequalities play out regularly in the sports world cannot be taken. For example, back then in 2017, SuperSport hosted a show, Let’s Play, where she and a production team traveled to communities around Nigeria to introduce sports to children in partnership with national federations and coaches.
Approximately 90 percent of their participants are boys. When she visits schools to recruit girls, she is told either they do not want to play, or their parents will not let them play. To her, this mentality denies girls the opportunity to better their lives and empower their future children.
The case is the same in professional sports, where women’s facilities are lacking and pay is drastically unequal. The senior women’s national soccer team, the Super Falcons, have been paid considerably less than the men’s Super Eagles, despite outperforming the men and winning Africa’s continental championship eight more times than the next closest country. “People think it doesn’t matter, but it matters so much to the girls,” Ezeoke says. “They are breadwinners. Their families look to them for help. Aren’t we all Nigerian citizens, entitled to the same benefits?” she said.
Ezeoke believes positive change can come as more women are exposed to sports at early ages and she won’t relent in that pursuit.
Benprince Ezeh
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