The Problem with Nigerian Football

Last week I asked the question, ‘Can Nigeria win the cup?’ For those who could read carefully between the lines, my implicit, and occasionally even explicit answer to that question was, ‘No’. Some may have perhaps deemed that unpatriotic so we were careful in making this point but the sum total of the article were the following assertions-many of the players in our team are average, or at best slightly above average; Kanu Nwankwo who used to be a real star is now well past his prime; John Mikel Obi is the only authentic world class star in our team; weighed against teams like Cote D’Ivoire and Ghana, the Nigerian team is a second rate team, and looked at objectively the Nigerian team stands little chance of victory in Ghana.

Well by the time you are reading this, Nigeria will probably have crashed out of the African Nations Cup in the first round, a true national embarrassment if ever there was one! Even though I’m writing this piece on Sunday afternoon, it is safe to project that the Ivorienes and Malians would do the safe and sensible thing-play a draw-and guarantee their entry into the next round, making nonsense of any Nigerian victory over Benin Republic. And so the biggest sporting disgrace to afflict Nigeria in a long while will befall us and our compatriots. The only surprise is that Nigerians are surprised. Our team is very weak relative to the competition, the coach is very deficient strategically and tactically, and the team sprit, discipline and organisation are nothing to write home about.

But those are only symptoms. The problems of football in Nigeria are more fundamental and unless we address them headlong, Nigeria will sooner than later become a second rate team in Africa. Of course it all boils down to organisation. Last week I wrote that “The long term imperative for African sports is for entrepreneurially-minded managers to take control of the management of sports, and to evolve a sustainable model of sports funding, marketing and organisation. The leagues in Africa will not develop until the clubs are privately-owned institutions, with wide shareholder participation, a commercial model dependent on gate takings, broadcast revenues, marketing of memorabilia and an enthusiastic fan base. The reluctance of sports administrators to allow such a model in favour of their present rent-facilitating system, will only prolong the drain of African talent to leagues in England, Spain, Italy, France and other countries organised in a commercially viable and sustainable manner.” You may substitute ‘Nigeria’ every where you have ‘Africa’ in that quote!

Football is business and until our administrators treat it as such we will continue to fumble and sub-optimize. I read with sadness a recent interview where Dr Amos Adamu, Director-General of the Nigerian Sports Commission arrogantly argued in favour of continued government control of sports, according to him because the private sector cannot fund sports. If his peculiar logic and reasoning is correct, that must be something unique to Nigeria because the private sector happens to fund sports in all the countries where we have money spinning football leagues-England, Italy, Spain, France, Holland etc Of course he will then argue that Nigeria is different from those countries and that such private capital is not available in Nigeria. We will of course laugh at such suggestion, because we remember they told us the government must continue to fund telecommunications in Nigeria, because the private sector did not have resources to fund it. Of course we now know better. The private sector which funds telecommunications, banking, oil and gas, aviation, breweries and beverages, broadcasting etc will of course fund sports (and power) if only the bureaucrats will allow them to, and will create a sustainable structure and appropriate laws and policies in that direction. Just like NITEL and Nigerian Airways proved to be worse than the private sector possibilities we later discovered, we will also find that sports in Nigeria will grow phenomenally when government assumes it proper role of facilitator and infrastructure provider rather than administrator.

The age group competitions have also become a major problem with Nigerian football. FIFA created age group contests to help discover youth talent and institutionalize youth football. They were a means to an end, not an end in themselves. Nigeria has in a typical short-sighted manner turned the under-17 contest into an end in itself. So we cheat and celebrate that we have conquered the world at under-17 level, when every Nigerian knows that we send men with average ages of 25 years or slightly lower to those competitions. We all carry on the collective self-deception and no one asks why after winning the under-17 world cup three times we have not managed to win African Nations Cup more than twice, and we have never reached the quarter-finals of the World Cup.

I found it interesting that after our recent ‘conquest’ of the world at under-17 level, we invited the ‘Yahoozee’ musician right into the hallowed precincts of Aso Rock to entertain our President with his song which glorifies cheating and ‘yahoo yahoo’ just as we had cheated the world. It says something about our degraded national morality that one of our most popular hit songs celebrates doing nothing except searching for a ‘yahoo yahoo’ hit Monday to Friday until you hit a million dollars, buy a hummer jeep, fly on holiday all over the world and ends by deriding those who came to the world to work while hailing those who came to the world to enjoy. Those are the actual lyrics of the song! And I do not recall reading or hearing much complaining about the song or the immorality behind it.

The under-17 tournament damages our football development because we send those who should be playing for the senior national team to the teenage contest and trade-off our future for the present, like Esau did with Jacob. Even after we win those teenage contests using fully matured players, we then amazingly pretend that they are actually teenagers and promote them two or three years later to the under-21 team. The result is that with only few exceptions (such as Osazee Odemwingie), our national team is peopled by footballers who are aged between 32 and 38 years old. Why are we are surprised when energetic youths like Salomon Kalou dribble four of them and score as happened in the Nigeria-Cote D’Ivoire match. Of course competitive football is best played by men between 21 and 28 years old and God will not bend the laws of nature no matter how much Nigerians deceive themselves!

If we stop cheating and send real under-17 boys to those contests, we will have a rich pool of talent who can play at the highest level for the next 10-15 years until they are 28-32 years. If we send real under-21 boys to under-21 contests, they will play for the next 10 years or so in the best teams in the world; ditto if we sent under-23 boys to the Olympics. Instead we deceive ourselves and win meaningless titles while the rest of the world wonders why we win so empathically at junior level but struggle in the real thing. Our bureaucrats must know that they will not be civil servants for ever. Will they think about Nigeria for once, and stop regarding our sports as a private fiefdom?