There's something special going on in Nigeria. The Nigerian Professional Football League's season ended earlier this week, and with it wraps up the most stunning display of home field advantage in recent memory. Well, that, or everyone involved is just horribly, amazingly, profoundly corrupt.
Over the 38-match season, nearly every team in the league won between zero and two away matches. One intrepid outlier won three, you suspect half-by-accident.
There are a bunch of reasons this happens, the first being, obviously, corruption. All kinds of corruption! There is team-to-team corruption, with the visiting team sometimes being bribed with cash or win trading. There is official corruption, with referees being paid off or threatened. And there is good old fashioned American gamesmanship-style corruption, with teams sabotaging the food and water and travel arrangements of their opponents. This culminated earlier this year with a 79-0 match in the third division.
Not that the comical home winning percentage is necessarily the worst thing. When the home team does manage to lose, there is often violence among the fans, who didn't pay to see their squad lose a match.
A special squad is being assembled ostensibly to address the corruption, but mostly to collect on cheekily ironic bribes.