Daniel Olasanmiju: Meet the visionary Nigerian founder of Berlin’s African football Club

On a recent Saturday morning, I met Daniel Olasanmiju at a Starbucks in the Schönhauser Allee Arcaden, in Berlin’s Pankow district. As my three-year-old son Daniel ran around the mall, I listened intently to Olasanmiju’s inspiring journey into the world of sports entrepreneurship.

Olasanmiju came to Germany a few years ago to study and now works in human resources at a tech company. His interest in football as a business grew while working as a data scout for football platforms in Berlin. Watching numerous teams in the lower tiers of German football, he noticed a significant gap.

“I have seen African talents, that are very good, struggle to make it in an average German team,” Olasanmiju told Soccernet.ng. “And when you try to communicate with them to understand what they are going through, they often don’t get explanations about why they’re not getting opportunities.”

Recognizing the need for a supportive community, he knew action was necessary. “It was necessary for us as a community to come together and create something for ourselves.”

The founding – Motherland BSC

Olasanmiju founded the Motherland Berlin Sports Club e.V., which oversees the Motherland Berlin SC, a football team competing in the Berlin Bezirksliga FZ, the lowest division of the Berlin football league in May 2023.

“There’s been huge support from the community,” Olasanmiju noted. The team consists of 25 players from Berlin’s African community, including expatriates and those born in Germany. They play most weekends and are currently second in the Freizeitliga, with hopes of topping the table by season’s end.

“It is empowering, not just to myself, but to a whole lot of other people in the African community. The fact that there’s an African person, who is relatively unknown and could do this, it is empowering for them that they can do whatever they want to do also,” he said. “The greatest number of questions that I get is, ‘how did you get the strength to do this?’ That question is not to demean but to show that whatever I want to do in this country, I can also do it.”

An African joy

Last weekend, I attended my first game of the team. They arrived early at the Cornelius Fredericks Sportplatz in Wedding for their match against Welt Verein. It was a close-knit community of young African men united by a common goal.

Dressed in their yellow and black jerseys sponsored by the Tony Ujah Foundation, they dominated the game, winning 9-2. The players celebrated every goal joyously, a Cristiano Ronaldo “Siuu” here and Julius Aghahowa-like backflips there, creating a vibrant, jubilant atmosphere.

“My biggest success is in bringing together this talented group of African athletes and giving them the belief that they’re being taken seriously, that they are the same as everyone and that they deserve the same platform,” Olasanmiju said.

Olasanmiju dreams of seeing the club ascend to the upper echelons of German football, and perhaps one day in the future playing in the Bundesliga. “Most importantly, my dream is to have a functional youth system that develops talent. We want little African kids to be able to grow through the ranks and up into the senior team,” he said.

This July, the club will run free summer programs for children in the Berlin African community, aiming to engage parents and nurture young talent.

“If someone told me last year that this was possible, I would have said ‘no’, because of how Germany is perceived. But when I got into it, I realized that there’s absolutely nothing that we cannot achieve,” Olasanmiju said. The club has received some funding from the Berlin office for sports among others.

This weekend, in celebration of its one-year anniversary, Motherland BSC will participate in the African Unity Cup, competing against two other African-founded football clubs in Germany: Afrika FC of Cologne and Afrikanischer SV of Hannover.