TPL5: The Review

TPL5: The Review

Did you miss the 5th Edition of the Twitter Premier league on Saturday 5th September, 2015?
Well, according to those who were there you missed out on the best and biggest TPL football tournament till date. After months of intense preparation by the TPL organizing body and the independently run teams, the 5th edition of the event has been referred to as “the best one yet”.

TPL5 held on Saturday, 5th September 2015 at Campos Mini Stadium, Lagos Island. Kick off was at exactly 10 am and the event came to a close at around 7 pm.

Partners and Sponsors

TPL5 was proudly sponsored by Mall For Africa, Africa’s biggest online shopping mall. Representatives from Mall For Africa were present at the tournament with awards and gift items for the winners.
We also partnered with other corporate brands such as Printivo (our printing partner) Lucozade Sport (our official energy drink), Ebony Life TV, PayWithCapture (a payment solution powered by Access bank, offering TPL5 tickets at a 50% discount to people who bought tickets with the PayWithCapture mobile app), Knektah Juice (our natural fruit juice partners), Zikoko Mag, City FM 105.1 (our radio partners), to make the event an overall success.

Photo of representatives from Printivo
Representatives from Printivo

 

Photo of Mall for Africa representatives
Mall For Africa, the proud sponsors of TPL5, were well represented too.

 

Publicity

Currently, the TPL’s target audience is the youth of Lagos state. The goal is to bridge the gap between social media and in-person communication by encouraging young people to come together in a healthy, safe and fun environment.

The TPL took to Twitter, Facebook and Google + to publicize the event. The teams which are run independent of the TPL organizing body also engaged their fans and supporters via social media in order to get them talking about the event and participating eventually.

Turn Out

Overall attendance was estimated at about 1000 players and team fans. Residents of Lagos state and even neighboring cities came trooping into Campos Mini stadium, to be part of this exciting soccer event.
At 2:40 pm on Saturday, #TPL5 became the number one trending topic on Nigerian Twitter Trends. This simply means the event was the most talked (tweeted) about topic in Nigeria at the time. #TPL5 remained one of the top 10 trending Twitter topics in Nigeria 48 hours after the event had ended as news of the show continued to travel and permeate the rest of Nigerian twitter. The @theTPL twitter handle ended up having the most number of “what is TPL?” mentions ever in its history. This means that the TPL name is becoming even more popular and breaking through social media as its audience increases.

Spectators
So far, TPL5 holds the highest record for event turn out.

 

The Fun Corner
In a bid to provide alternative avenues for crowd engagement, and sources of fun and excitement that aren’t limited to playing and watching others play soccer, we introduced the TPL fun corner. The fun corner featured mini basketball tournaments, and soccer shoot outs (a.k.a. monkey post). We have taken the feedback from our debut appearance and are working to make the fun corner even more exciting and engaging for the crowd.

 

TPL attendees playing basketball
Some basketball action on the court.

 

The book lovers were not left out as Bookbarter NG provided well over 200 books for sale and exchange at TPL5.

 

Books for exchange

Of course, our vendors were very present as well. Food, drinks and other non-edible items, were sold out before the end of the day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Game
The Cubs, The Guns, The Knights, The Red Devils, The Royals and the Saints all battled for the title.
The Saints emerged winners (2-1) after an exciting, tension-packed final against The Royals.

The Saints, TPL5 Champions

 

The Royals, after their loss.

 

TPL5 holds the record for the highest number of goals ever scored in a TPL tournament, seeing a total of 22 goals in 9 matches. This tells us that all teams put up a good fight and the champions did not have it easy at all.
The Saints have won the title two consecutive times now, and it goes without saying that TPL6 is going to see all teams coming back with an even greater resolve to displace the reigning champions. Will the Saints set a new record by taking the cup home a third time? We cannot wait for 19th December, 2015!

See you at TPL6!

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