By Bunmi Ogunyale
Arsenal FC star, Alex Iwobi and Leicester City’s Wilfried Ndidi previewed the new designs of the national team jerseys in London yesterday.
NIKE officials revealed that the players were invited to give options and suggestions for the new designs.
It is best practice for the world’s leading kit manufacturers to invite top officials of their clients to preview and authorise a new design before the said piece is produced and launched for use.
It would be recalled that NIKE’s special design for Nigeria for the 2018 FIFA World Cup, which sold out on the streets of London hours after it was released onto the market on the first day of June last year, was previewed and authorised by the NFF bigwigs in Year 2016. The current designs would remain until the 2020 Olympics, when the new designs would be launched.
Production would only begin on the new design after the previewing and authorisation, and would be launched in July 2020, on the margin of the Olympic Games in Tokyo. It would serve the various national teams between 2020 and the early months of 2022, before a new design would be released for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, after the Super Eagles must have qualified.
Chieftains of the Nigeria Football Federation, led by Nigeria’s Minister of Sports had also arrived in London, United Kingdom for a series of meetings with sportswear behemoth, NIKE that have to do with optimising the performance of the new, robust contract signed by NFF and NIKE in November 2018.
The meetings would also dwell on merchandising, as well as previewing and authorisation of a new kit design for the national teams to be launched in the summer of Year 2020.
NIKE and the Nigeria delegation will also firm up strategy to set up outlets (and online platforms) across Nigeria to ensure NIKE kits and other merchandise are available to fans across the country and the world.