In short
The short version
You put yourself on the register at /join. Your name, age, position, club, state and any photographs or clips you add become a public profile that anyone can find. Your National Identity Number (NIN), your phone number and your exact date of birth do not: they are encrypted and are never served by any public page, printed in any email, or shown to anyone without a written reason being recorded.
You can register yourself only if you are 18 or over. A date of birth below that is refused at the point of entry, so nothing about an under-18 registrant is ever written down.
Collection
What is collected, and why
You give us the following when you register:
- Your name — it is how you are found, and it is what the NIN check compares against.
- Your date of birth — it decides whether you are eligible, and it is what your published age is worked out from.
- Your phone number — so the competition can reach you, and so that one person cannot register twice.
- Your National Identity Number — so the register can say that a named player is a real, identified person, and so that one player holds one entry.
- A photograph — a profile without a face is not much use to a scout or a coach.
- Video clips and links, if you add them — your own footage, highlight reels or social accounts.
- Your club, state and local government area, and playing details such as position, preferred foot, squad number and height.
None of this is bought, sold, shared with advertisers, or used to build a profile of you for any purpose beyond this competition and its register.
The lawful basis is your consent. You cannot complete registration without ticking the box that says your profile may be published, and the register records that you gave that consent and when.
Publication
What is public, and what is not
Your public profile shows, and shows only:
- Your name
- Your age as a whole number
- Position, preferred foot, squad number and height
- State, local government area and club
- Your bio, in your own words
- Photographs and clips you have added, and links you have given
- A NIN-verified badge, if your number has been checked and cleared
The badge is the outcome, never the number. Your NIN itself appears on no public page at all.
These are never published, in any form, on any page:
- Your NIN.
- Your phone number.
- Your date of birth. Only your age is shown. A full date of birth sitting next to a full name and a photograph is the usual starting kit for identity fraud, and no scouting profile needs the day.
- Any document you send in as evidence of age or identity.
This is enforced in code rather than by care. The public view of a player is a fixed list of permitted fields, not the full record with the private parts filtered out — so a new field is published only when someone deliberately adds it to that list, and the test suite fails the build if an identity field ever appears in a public response.
Eligibility
Adults, and children through their academy
You can register yourself only if you are 18 or over. The age check runs before anything is saved: if the date of birth you enter puts you under 18, the registration is refused and your name, phone number and NIN are never written to the database.
A player under 18 can be on the register in one way only: their academy registers them, names a parent or guardian, and records that guardian's consent. Without a named guardian the record is refused. A child's profile is never shown on the public register and cannot be published, by anyone. It is visible to the academy that registered them and to the register's own reviewers. The guardian's name is held; their phone number is encrypted like every other.
A parent or guardian can ask at any time to see, correct or remove a child's record, through the academy or by writing to us directly.
Because age is the one detail a registrant has an obvious reason to get wrong, the date of birth returned by the NIN check is compared with the one given. A disagreement, or an adult registration whose NIN shows a child, stops the profile from being published and goes to a person to look at.
Third party
The NIN check
Your NIN is checked through a third-party verification service, liqwifi (api.liqwifi.com). Your number is sent to that service, which answers whether it corresponds to a real identity record and returns the name and date of birth held against it.
That service sends back considerably more about you than the check requires — among other things an address, an email address, a phone number, gender, religion, a portrait photograph and a signature image. The register discards all of it. None of those fields is stored, logged or shown to anybody. What is kept is the verdict, the name and date of birth used for the comparison, and technical details of the request such as a reference and a status message. Absorbing the rest would quietly turn a football register into a partial copy of the national identity database, which is not what you agreed to.
The record of each check holds the verdict alone — it contains no NIN. If the checker is slow, rate-limited or unreachable, your entry simply stays unverified and is tried again; that is not treated as a finding about you.
The register is not operated by, and has no privileged access to, the National Identity Management Commission. It can tell you that a number checked out. It cannot alter, correct or delete anything held about you in the national identity database — that has to be taken up with NIMC.
Media
Photographs and video
Photographs are stripped of their embedded metadata when you upload them. Phone cameras write the GPS position into the image file, and this register publishes players' photographs to the open web — it must not also publish the location of the ground you train on, or of your house. Every image is re-encoded so that the location, the camera, the serial number and the timestamp are all gone from what is stored and served. Documents you send as evidence get the same treatment, and are never published.
Video clips are transcoded for playback. Anything you upload or link to is published on your profile, so please do not add footage of someone else who has not agreed to it.
Handling
How the private details are held
- Encrypted at rest. Your NIN and phone number are encrypted (Fernet) in the database. The database does not hold a readable copy of either.
- Duplicate checking without a readable copy. A one-way keyed fingerprint of each number is stored alongside it, which is what lets the register enforce one player, one NIN without ever keeping the number in the clear.
- Every look is logged. Staff normally see your NIN and phone number masked. Revealing either in full is a separate action that requires a written reason, and the log entry naming who asked, when and why is written before the value is decrypted.
- Emails carry no identity data. Notifications go to staff — the agent who captured a record, reviewers, administrators — and never to players; the register holds your phone number, not your email address. No message ever contains a NIN, a phone number or a date of birth, and the test suite fails the build if one does.
- An unpublished profile is invisible, not hidden. A profile that has been withheld or never approved returns the same "not found" as a profile that does not exist, because confirming that someone is on the register is itself a disclosure.
Your entry
Correcting, withdrawing and taking down
Your claim link
There is no password and no account. When you register you are given a claim link — a signed web address that opens your own entry and nobody else's. It works for 45 days. Keep it: it is how you add a photograph, attach a clip, fix your club or position, or change your bio.
Your name, your date of birth and your NIN cannot be changed through the claim link, because those are the identity of the record and changing them on an unauthenticated link would defeat the verification. Ask a reviewer and a person will make the change.
Withdrawing, and taking a profile down
Ask and your profile will be taken off the public register. Taking a profile down switches off its publication: it stops being reachable, it stops appearing in search, and it becomes indistinguishable from a profile that was never there. The underlying record is retained, so that the register still knows which entries existed and so the same NIN cannot quietly be registered again.
If you want the record itself erased rather than withheld, say so. Erasure will be carried out unless there is a specific reason it cannot be — for example a live dispute about eligibility — and you will be told which it is and why.
Retention
The register is intended to last for the competition and to remain a reference afterwards, so a published profile stays up until you ask for it to come down. Records of verification attempts hold only the verdict, never a NIN. Access logs are kept because they are the only way to answer "who looked at my details", which is the whole point of keeping them. A fixed retention period has not yet been set, and must be agreed and stated here before launch.
Compliance
Data compliance
Data compliance on this platform is powered by Adil — www.adil.ng. Adil is the compliance layer this register works to: the standard against which its handling of personal data, its consent records, its access logging and its response to your requests are assessed.
If you think this register has mishandled your data, raise it with us first. You keep the right to complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission whether or not you do.
Your rights
Under the Nigeria Data Protection Act
The Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023 gives you rights over the personal data held about you here. In practice that means you can:
- Ask what is held about you, and be given a copy of it.
- Have anything inaccurate corrected.
- Withdraw the consent you gave at registration, and have your profile taken down.
- Ask for your data to be erased.
- Object to how your data is being used, and ask that its use be restricted while an objection is looked at.
- Complain to the Nigeria Data Protection Commission.
Withdrawing consent does not undo what was lawfully done before you withdrew it — a profile that was public until Tuesday was public until Tuesday, and pages other people have already saved or copied are outside anyone's reach. It does mean the profile comes down.
The Act also requires that access to identity data be controlled and accounted for. That is why staff see masked values by default, why revealing a NIN or a phone number takes a written reason, and why every such access is logged.
Contact
Getting in touch
To correct something, withdraw your consent, take your profile down, ask what is held about you, or report a problem with this page, write to the register's operators using the contact details published alongside the competition. A contact address and a named data protection contact must be filled in here before this register opens to the public.
If you still have your claim link, the quickest way to fix a detail is to open it and change it yourself.
Standing
Changes, and what this page is not
If what the register does with your data changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves.