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Polo. It's known as the sport of kings, but in Nigeria it's become the sport of business kings. The polo field provides another forum for business giants to battle, and even government ministers and global giants like Coca Cola are getting in on the act.
It's a sport where you can meet people. I think it was the famous Prime Minister Winston Churchill that said polo is a passport to the world.
On today's podcast, we'll look at how playing polo has become an essential part of doing business and whether victories on the field are translating to higher profits.
And this is money listening on in action, he goes all the way, sixty, taughty, dirty, he does it.
I'm Jennifer's Ambasaja and this is the Next Africa Podcast, bringing you one story each week from the continent driving the future of global growth with the context only Bloomberg can provide. Joining me today is Bloomberg's reporter tiwa Adebayo, who is also a polo player. We should note tiwa thanks so much for joining us. Let's just get right into it, talk about how polo became such a big sport in Nigeria.
Well, the thing to know about polo in Nigeria is that it's actually almost as old as the country itself. It was brought over by British military personnel. It was first played by the Cavalry. The first match actually happened in Lagos in nineteen oh four. But it's a very big sport and it's played by a lot of individuals. It's growing in Nigeria. There's around twenty seven different polo clubs. There's thirty three different playing fields, from josh Badon to Lagos.
The Lagos Polo Club is definitely the eminent club, not just in Nigeria but also in Africa as well. It's where the highest handycap polo tournament in Africa's played. Highest handicap meaning is where the best players, the highest ranked players in the world play. The Lagos Polo Club itself has around four hundred members. Now there's about seven hundred
and fifty active players in Nigeria as a whole. So it may come as a surprise to people in the West, perhaps in Europe, that polo is as big and people are as passionate about it in Nigeria and across the continent in Africa as well and Tia.
I should admit my knowledge of polo is very limited. I know a bit about it. There was a special on Netflix actually I think it was produced by Printeria and the Duchess, but I don't know much about it. What I do know is that it is quite expensive though for people who do play it. Who is paying for it in some of these clubs in Nigeria.
Well, to really get an understanding of who's paying for it, you need to understand a bit about the rules of polo and the culture surrounding the game. So just a little crash course, on every team, there's four players and one of those players is usually someone called the patron, and that person is responsible for funding the team. They pay the tournament entry. They usually own the horses that
you play with, or they rent the horses. Sometimes they'll bring in a professional player as well, so they'll pay those fees and they're essentially responsible for making sure it's all paid for and it all goes through. So that's how a lot of it is finance. But there's also the corporate involvement as well, So in Nigeria specifically, there's very large involvement by financial services companies, notably GT Bank in Nigeria, the title sponsor of the Legos International Polo
Tournament this year. They've been sponsoring polo tournaments for around eighteen years. You also have Chapel Hill Denim there's another title sponsor. Companies and charities as well use so there's a lot of different sources of funding that go into the sport. But crucially, when I've been speaking to people, what they're saying is that the sponsorship is growing and
it's also changing in shape. So it might have started off as these companies financing polo tournaments as a way to entertain their private wealth clients, for example, bringing people to the polo it's usually a long day out and you can have drinks at the bar in between the matches,
so it's a good way to entertain corporate clients. But they've moved from doing this to actually sponsoring the tournaments in a more traditional way that you might expect of a football tournament for example, So having their logos up around the polo field and having their branding crucially on the live streams of these polo tournaments. That's another area that the game is expanding into The Lagos International Polo Tournament was streamed on YouTube this year and it has
been done for a couple of years. So the sport is expanding, and what I've been told is that these brands are really using it as a visibility platform and they're trying to attach themselves to this label of premium level entertainment and luxury, which is a very lucrative market, especially for the financial services sector.
How important is it then for these businesses? I mean you mentioned how it's growing. Clearly they believe they have a client tell that they could tap into. How is it being seen as a business tool for some of these companies.
Well, I did a bit of research into this to find out kind of why they put their sponsorship and really their name behind these tournaments and actually GT Bank they've described the Lagos International Polo Tournament played at Lagos Polo Club as a staple in Nigeria's sporting and social calendar and they say they remain committed to driving positive change with it and also the impact and fostering of
community of the sport. So it's clear they see a lot of different avenues with which they can grow brand and it's no surprise as well that the clientele that play polo are very useful for them. So just in the Lagos Polo Club alone, in its members it counts the Finance Minister of Nigeria, lat Edgen for example, Cola Kareem famously the CEO of Shoreline. I spoke to him
before this recording as well. He actually owns a polo team called Showline Polo, so he described it as a sort of natural extension of his company as it were, He's a polo fanatic, one of the highest ranked players that isn't professional in the country, so it's useful for
them to have access to these people. And the way it's been described to me is that if one of these companies were to set up a billboard, for example, on the side of the road, maybe twenty percent of the people that passed that billboard would be relevant the target market that they're trying to reach. But with polo, as the former president of Legos Polo Club Adele told me, they can guarantee really that eighty percent of the clientele will be the people that they're trying to speak to.
I spoke to the commercial director of the Africa Polo Network, Mercedi Molasiwa and he told me just how lucrative the sponsorship mark is a polo is.
It's modest, but in quantums of millions of let's say South African rands. Because these are private or they're not really that public. I'm giving you an estimation in the you know, anything ranging between three to five million rands South African rands for Netbank. The point out I do want to say is that what we have observed is that once the corporate sponsor is on board, you do see an increasing level of investment in the quality of
the tournament experience. With every passing year, the level of investment in the tournament increases and it's visible.
And do you stick with us? When we come back, we'll hear more about the songe power role that polo is playing and how it can potentially spill off of the field and into the boardroom.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back. Today. We're looking at the role polo is playing amongst Nigeria's business elite. Tiwa Atabayo is still with me, Tia, You've been speaking to some of Legos's polo playing community. Talk more about what they were telling you.
Well, I had a really fascinating conversation with Cola Kareem, who is the CEO of Shoreline Energy and also the owner of Shoreline Polo. So I asked him basically, what is the business case for Shoreline Polo. Shoreline and it's one of the leading energy and infrastructure companies across Africa, and he says to me that actually the Shoreline Polo team as it were, has kind of always existed. So
he plays the sport, his sons play the sport. He mentioned siblings that play it, so it wasn't a sort of surprise to formalize that into a funded, fully funded polo operation. He told me that there's this real association between polo and excellence, and so it's no surprise that he'd want to associate his brand with that. We also spoke a bit about how Polo can act as a bridge between Africa and perhaps countries in the West and even in the Middle East in terms of business links.
Cola Kareem has recently been appointed as to the advisory board of British American Tobacco and he said to me that working with these companies outside of Africa, he's able to use Polo as a point of reference and a global platform, as he described it, to bounce off of. So I think it's really interesting at how polo is building links between different countries but also within Africa. I was speaking to Adeleyier, who is the former president of the Lagos Polo Club.
It's a sport where you can meet people. I think it was the famous Prime Minister Winston Churchill that said polo is a passport to the world. The Nairobi and Legos Club now have a yearly competition where we go to Nairabia and play and they come to Legos and play, and that alone has fostered social and economical benefits for both sides. We also play the Heritage Cup at Guards
in England. The Heritage Cup is based on the Commonwealth teams playing together playing in England, not already not only Foster's Commonwealth relationship, but of course there'll be businesses there as well.
So it seems like it's a force that brings people together, as many sports do. And the president of the Polo Africa Polo Network said to me that they see the sport growing into something akin to golf or Formula one for example, a sport that is perhaps targeted at a premium market, but with a very broad appeal as well.
Well, it's interesting that you mentioned a game like golf, right. You just take a look at some of the deals that have reportedly been done on the golf course, some of the present and then I want name names that prefer to spend a lot of time on the golf course and the business that has got done historically. Could that now the role that we've seen golf play could pull those step in and sort of fill that void at least in Legos or in some parts of Africa.
Well, it does seem to be going that way one because of the clientele, but crucially there is a networking element as well, because it's not just the players that make up the game of polo. To have a polo team, you need an extensive team of grooms to look after the horses. And those are often people who perhaps don't come from those same circles of world leaders and CEOs, but they have a love for horses that is shared between them. For example, Cola Kareem's Shoreline polo team this
year have actually been playing with a groom. So that groom the talent was recognized and he was moved up into the team, and I've been speaking to various players throughout the scene who have said to me that they've seen grooms sponsored to complete their master's studies, for example, and then go on to work in financial institutions with their patron and it can definitely change one's life. They can enter into an industry which they may not have been exposed to, and it does remind me of the
game of golf. Actually, you hear often about people that were caddies in golf and got speaking to business leaders or portfolio managers and were offered internships. So it seems like there is that same spirit of networking and entrepreneurship that goes on in polo as well as in golf, and it's growing in popularity, especially in Nigeria.
Which is why it would make sense for big global giants like Coca Cola and others to get in on this.
Right absolutely, Coca Cola has a polo team that plays in Nigeria that bears the Coca Cola branding. Then you have teams like MSD Baby Bear that is owned by the Dan Goto's Cola. Kareem tells me that there is a fierce rivalry between a Shoreline Polo Team and Steve Babybaar obviously two big magnates of the energy sector within Africa.
That rivalry definitely spills onto the polo field as well, and he spoke to me about the real desire to win because you're playing with the company's name emblazoned across you. But something else that's really compelling I think about polo is Cola Karine put it to me and said, there's only two things that stop people from playing polo. It's fear and the second one is death. So it's a
very dangerous sport. But I'm told that that camaraderie that you build because you have to trust your teammates to such an extent, makes it easier to have dealings in the business world because these are people that you really get to know on a quite an intimate basis and in a very high pressure, intense and often stressful game.
I mean, those are two very legitimate reasons to not play this absolutely just saying how competitive are we getting here?
It's definitely something that a lot of resources are being being poured into. There is talk about building polo fields in Issamine, just outside Legos, which is going to be
a very big tourist area as well. That development's going on there, but they want to as well as growing the tourist attractions, they also want to grow the game of polo alongside that, because it's clear that there's appetite for it to watch the game, to be involved in it, not just people that play it, people that are passionate about horses and passionate about watching too. So you're definitely seeing a very competitive level of the sport. But that
is the thing about polo. It's one of the very few sports that you can't pretend to play because at the end of the day you have to get on a horse and go at about thirty miles an hour and also hit a ball at the same time. And I can tell you from experience it's definitely not easy and it's not always the safest, shall we say.
And thanks again to Bloomberg's tiwa Adebayo for that reporting. And here's a few other stories we've been following across the region. This week, Sudan's army recaptured the national capital from the Rapid Support Forces militia, a turning point in a two year civil war that's drawn in outside powers
and torn the resource rich North African country apart. The advance is a major blow for the RSF, which had seized control of swaths of Khartoum and the rest of the nation after the eruption in April twenty twenty three of a conflict that may have killed as many as one hundred and fifty thousand people. And South Africa, with the help of the World Bank, has a three billion dollar plan to reverse the decline in services and infrastructure
in eight of its biggest cities. It will use a one billion dollar loan from the World Bank coupled with two billion of government money to finance grants for cities including Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town that meet targets in providing water, sanitation, electricity, and solid waste processing under a new government program. And you can follow these stories across Bloomberg, including the Next African Newsletter. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. This program was produced by
Adrian Bradley. Don't forget to follow and review the show wherever you usually get your podcasts. I'm Jennifer Zabasanja. Thanks as always for listening.