“It’s Selfish Business”: How Mr Eazi’s Locker Room Bonus Bypasses FAs To Pay Lower-League Players

For years, delayed salaries and unfulfilled financial promises have remained an open secret in domestic Nigerian club football, particularly across lower-tier divisions. While elite teams occasionally capture headlines, players in grassroots leagues often navigate gruelling seasons without consistent remuneration.

Addressing this structural deficit, music entrepreneur and investor Oluwatosin Ajibade, widely known as Mr Eazi, has expanded his commercial footprint into sports technology through the Locker Room Bonus, a direct-payout initiative designed to reward lower-league footballers immediately upon securing a match victory.

Speaking during an interview on The Beat 99.9 FM with Osi Dirisu, the artist-turned-investor explained that the initiative is built on rigorous Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols and real-time data capture, intentionally routing funds past state football associations and club executives straight to the players’ accounts.

“Go ask any player in the Division Two league: immediately they win a game and get to their locker room, they get their alerts straight,” Mr Eazi stated. “It doesn’t pass through the FA; it doesn’t pass through the club—it goes straight to them.”

While the initiative provides immediate financial relief to athletes, Ajibade is candid about the commercial motivation driving the project. Rather than classifying the venture purely as corporate social responsibility (CSR), he frames it as foundational market building.

Drawing comparisons to the global music industry; where streaming metrics, digital registrations, and transparent royalty tracking allow investors to inject capital with confidence, he argued that African sports lack the verified data infrastructure required to attract institutional investors.

“This is selfish, you know, because if you want to put money into sports, the data has to be there,” he explained. “It’s easy to put money in music now because of the number of streams, registrations, and show data. So that’s what Locker Room Bonus is doing: we’re building the data infrastructure for sports. You go on the website and see how much money we’ve disbursed, the players who have gotten it, and the player data. It’s very clean and straight up.”

After initial resistance from higher-tier league administrators, the model found a receptive audience in Nigeria’s Division Two, where transparency and player motivation have yielded measurable engagement.

The sports tech venture coincides with a major corporate restructuring of Ajibade’s entertainment enterprises. Empawa Africa—the artist incubator model launched to fund independent creators and protect master ownership—is officially transitioning its overarching business operations into a unified entity named Chop Life.

Describing the new holding structure as his version of a multifaceted entertainment ecosystem, Ajibade noted that while the foundational Empawa mentorship programs will continue, all commercial verticals—ranging from music catalogues and live events like the Dirty Rave festival to physical recording spaces at Chop Life Studios—will operate under the new banner.

“The next step for Empawa is that it’s changing its name to Chop Life,” he said. “We’re bringing everything together. There will still be the Empawa program—the one that mentors artists—but the business is all coming together into Chop Life. It’s my Disney! It has everything in it; all my entertainment businesses are wrapped up in it.”

Reflecting on his intermittent breaks from releasing music over the years to focus on venture building and corporate expansion, Ajibade offered a characteristically lighthearted take on why he occasionally steps away from the spotlight to let others lead.

Drawing an unexpected parallel to Nigerian football history, he joked that his career moves mirror high-profile athletic transfers:

“This thing I did, I’ve done it before,” Ajibade quipped on air. “When Mikel Obi was supposed to be signed to Chelsea, they were going to sign me—it was like me and Mikel. But I just thought, Mikel doesn’t have talent as a musician, but I can do that, so I let Mikel go to Chelsea and I stepped back to make music. With this latest music break, I had to step back, go make a couple billions, and let other people shine.”

Invoking a popular maxim popularised by social media commentators, referencing internet philosopher “Shavi Vibes”, he added: “Like the great Nigerian philosopher Shavi Vibes said: ‘Let your brother shine!'”

Beyond the humour, Ajibade addressed the heavy reliance on foreign venture capital and international distribution funding across the continent’s creative sectors. While welcoming global investment, he issued a direct challenge to high-net-worth individuals and corporate institutions within Nigeria to recognise the creative and sports sectors as viable commercial assets.

“There’s nothing wrong with money coming from outside, but I feel there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of putting money into our own entertainment structures,” Ajibade noted. “There are so many multi-millionaires and billionaires in Nigeria, but hopefully now they can see that entertainment is not a joke—it is real business, and people can put money in it.”

As Chop Life expands its operations and seeks to scale data-backed financial models across more regional leagues, industry observers note that bridging the gap between raw creative talent and structural financial transparency remains key to sustainable growth across the continent.