Gone are the days when some of Nigeria’s elites would boast of being interested in buying huge stakes in foreign football clubs. While Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote has repeatedly spoken of his desire to purchase both Arsenal Football Club and French football club, Valenciennes, former Abia State governor, Senator Orji Uzor Kalu has in the past also boasted of his plan to purchase at least 35 per cent stake in Arsenal Club. But it appears that both of their desires are at best wishful thinking as the younger generation interested in owning football clubs are very serious about walking their talk.
Beside Nigerian billionaire, Dozy Mmobuosi making strategic moves to buy English club Sheffield United in a deal worth £90 million, another Nigerian who isn’t building castles in the air is Shola Akinlade. The young lad a few weeks ago shelled out a huge sum to buy majority stakes, 55 per cent to be precise, in Danish club, Aarhus Fremad and also finalise agreement for the football club to become a sister club to Sporting Lagos FC, a team in the Nigeria National League (NNL) which Akinlade founded in 2022. But who really is Akinlade and how was he able to shell out such a huge sum to purchase a Danish third-tier division club? A tech entrepreneur, he is the co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Paystack. Born in Lagos, Nigeria, Akinlade attended St Gregory’s College before proceeding to Babcock University for a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science. Fresh out of school, Akinlade worked as a Management Trainee and Database Manager with Heineken, but left after two years because he wanted to create things, rather than just be a management staff. He took his first shot at entrepreneurship when he founded Klein Devort, a software development and consulting company, with his friend, Mayowa Okegbenle in 2008. Their flagship product, Precurio was designed as a collaboration and content management platform for the mid-enterprise segment and businesses in emerging markets. Within five years of running the company, the duo had grown their small idea and had over 200,000 companies using it. It had been downloaded over 150,000 times and was available in six different languages.
The success of Precurio opened Akinlade to more opportunities and some banks started reaching out to him to build their banking software. It was in the course of executing these projects that the inspiration for Paystack, a Nigerian financial technology company that offers payment processing services to businesses, came to be. He co-founded it with Ezra Olubi in 2016 and it became the first Nigerian company to be accepted into the tech accelerator Y Combinator program and received funding of $120,000. In 2020, the company was acquired by Irish American financial services company, Stripe for $200 million, making it the biggest acquisition in Nigeria. Still based in Nigeria, it is headquartered in Lagos. Despite the deal, Paystack continues to operate independently with Akinlade as CEO. When Akinlade is not running Paystack, he is busy running the Sporting Lagos football club.
Ivory Ukonu is a versatile journalist with many years of experience, with entertainment and society reporting as her area of core competence.
