Football is a game of passion, and passions can become particularly inflamed when the sport represents larger political struggles. In Nigeria in 1977, an Africa-wide football contest fuelled the ethnic rivalry between the Yoruba and the Igbo people to the point that the military had to intervene. The game was to be played as a semi-final in the Africa Cup Winners’ Cup, the club football tournament that would go on to become the Caf Confederation Cup.
As scholars of sports communication, we recently published a research paper about that 1977 confrontation between Shooting Stars of Ibadan (Ibadan is home to a Yoruba majority in the south-west) and Enugu Rangers (Enugu is an Igbo state).
