It didn’t take long for Chisom Mbonu-Ezeoke to be known as “the football girl” among her friends in Nigeria. Word spread fast around her high school of the girl who knew more about soccer than the boys. “Many boys listened to me talk more than other boys because they were shocked a girl could know so much,” Chisom says. “I would watch SuperSport back then and tell my friends, ‘I’m going to work for that station one day.’” 

After obtaining her college degree, Chisom’s dream came to fruition when she was hired as the first female soccer analyst on SuperSport Nigeria—-one of the country’s largest media outlets covering professional soccer. After two years as an analyst, she began anchoring coverage of Spain’s La Liga and the English Premier League. A decade later, she remains the only female anchor for SuperSport Nigeria. 

In 2016, Chisom founded Akoni TV, an online storytelling platform that teaches women how to produce, edit, and write scripts for their own sports stories. She has traveled the world to report on mega-sporting events such as the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics, the 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cup, and the 2021 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games.