No Pads. No Helmets... Just Balls.

When, in late 2013, I decided to start a blog centred on Nigerian football, I did so mostly out of boredom.

I could give you a whole spiel about how I felt a burden in my soul to fill a void in Nigerian sportswriting (there was an element of that, to be honest), but life is often a lot more mundane than we are led to believe. Here’s the truth: I was a hobbyist fiction writer who had always loved football, and blogging was all the rave at the time. I reckoned it could not be that hard to marry both great passions.

I was wrong (I have scarcely written any more fiction in the ensuing period, not knowingly anyway), but I was also right in that, by virtue of that decision, I found my path. Looking back, the blog was a cringey business, so much so that I will not link it here, but it worked: important people paid not just attention but, eventually, money, and as a result I got to work with Goal, the biggest online footballing publication in the world, for close to eight years.

It was a brutal trial-by-fire but, by the end of it, even while transitioning to a new role elsewhere, I felt ready to give more. Hence this newsletter. Chaos Digest was born of a desire to write longer, more in-depth articles for a smaller, savvier, more niche audience without interference from number-crunchers and pageview fetishists. 

In the two years since it launched, I have mostly done what I set out to: there have been considerations of Kelechi Iheanacho’s Leicester career, a three-part series on Nigeria’s greatest-ever men’s footballers, Nigerian football’s self-defeating fixation with the no.10 shirt and role, a long read on Senegal’s run to the 2002 World Cup quarter-finals, and what Nigeria’s footballing identity is and where it came from, to name a few. More importantly, I have greatly enjoyed doing it, as I hope that you – Constant Reader – have.

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I do have one regret, however. It is that, on account of having other professional responsibilities, I have been unable to give Chaos Digest my fullest attention.

Much as I have done sterling work here, it remains a passion project, too often shunted aside by the very real pressures of meeting deadlines elsewhere. Unable to justify the time spent on it, the newsletter, of necessity, has often been made to wait. This explains the inconsistent schedule: when I began this, it was my intention to publish every other week, as opposed to every five.

I want to do this more, and I want to do it better. What that means is that Chaos Digest needs to transition to becoming a paid newsletter. Simple Plan.

I want to do a history of the 2006 CAF World Cup qualifying series, reimagine Kanu Nwankwo as an Avenger and El Hadji Diouf as Peter Pan, rank Africa Cup of Nations triumphs in order of difficulty to determine the true super-champion of the continent, discuss the evolution of Vincent Enyeama, mourn the great disappointments of Cameroon at the 2002 World Cup and the unfulfilled promise of Onyekachi Apam, and reminisce about the Africa-fueled Lens team of the early 2000s. 

If that sounds at all interesting – and there is more where those came from, believe me – then you are my audience. You will not read better prose about football from an African journalist anywhere else, and I say that with the utmost modesty. I really am that good. So, invest in best-in-class writing and make it worthwhile for me to give the very best of myself to you and to the world.

If you sign up as a paid subscriber on a month-by-month basis, you get

• One article every fortnight or so – good work takes time and research

If you sign up as a paid subscriber on a yearly or semi-yearly basis, in addition to the above, you get

• Priority when it comes to suggesting and voting on subject matter

If you sign up as an Ultra, however, in addition to the above, you will also receive

• A quarterly interview

• Exclusive snippets from my book, which is in progress – you will immediately receive a chapter if you sign up to a yearly subscription, and you will be able to weigh in with thoughts and impressions going forward as I share updates

If these do not interest you, or even if they do and the economy is not smiling in your general direction, that is fair enough. You will still receive new dispatches at roughly the same rate as currently i.e. every five weeks or so. You can show your support just the same by sharing this with as much fervour as you can muster, preferably with some elaboration as to why/how Chaos Digest is worth reading. That would mean a lot as well.

I have no idea how this will be received, but I am optimistic that enough of you still care about the sort of evocative, deep, analytical writing that I do to keep it alive going into the age of AI. Let us find out. Whether with one, or a hundred, or a thousand, I am ready.