There are two sides to Nigerian football: one is the national teams, and the other is our clubs and leagues. Both tend to develop in mutually inclusive ways, but for the national teams of any country to achieve their true potential, it is usually the case that the premium division of their leagues must be competitive and successful. This ensures the country’s best talents are seamlessly developed from youth stages to top-flight levels. Properly managed, professional club football can create thousands of plum jobs in a country like Nigeria, and have a significant impact on our economy. Where the national teams are strong, the domestic top-flight is usually vibrant and competitive, but where the elite division is weak, the national teams tend to be unable to have sustainable success. So which is the case in Nigeria?
The Nigerian Professional Football League has been struggling since the turn of the 21st Century as globalisation and satellite television have seen football fans in this country abandon our clubs to follow the richer and more popular European leagues. This trend has weakened our clubs and the competitiveness of our league. It has virtually killed the marketability of our league and clubs, and potentially cost the country tens of thousands of jobs. It has also ensured that we can no longer control the progress of our players and consequently the Super Eagles have been weaker.
In the past week I watched a documentary on Brazilian great, Ronaldinho, and how his career took off. After conquering the world at the U-17 World Cup in 1997, he joined Brazilian club Gremio where he honed his talents from 1998 to 2001 when he moved to PSG in France. The legendary Argentine Diego Maradona played for Argentinos Juniors for five years, from the age of 16, before joining Boca Juniors for an additional season and then moving to Barcelona. More recently 19-year-old Brazilian Kenedy joined English club Chelsea after five years at Fluminense.
Players like Oscar, Sergio Aguero, Ramires, Cristiano Ronaldo, Alexis Sanchez and a host of others, all played at home before making the big leap to Europe’s top leagues. This suggests that, unlike most young Nigerian players today, these players were made by clubs in their domestic leagues not their national youth teams. It also means they continue their football development with little or no disruptions before and after international youth duty. The result is that they usually have developed their styles of play and are more confident in expressing their talent by the time they make the big move overseas. Most of them move straight into the senior teams of clubs in the bigger leagues and find it easier to adapt after gaining reasonable top-flight experience back home.
The situation is really not different in Nigeria, rather our current struggles are directly proportional to the problems of our domestic game. Our most successful products on the international stage have mostly all come from our domestic league. In the 1990s and 2000s when we had players in clubs like Barcelona, Juventus, Arsenal and the like, most of them had their roots in Nigerian clubs. The likes of Austin Okocha, Kanu Nwankwo, Finidi George, Sunday Oliseh, Rashidi Yekini, Emmanuel Amuneke, Daniel Amokachi, and more recently Ahmed Musa, had developed the characters of top-flight players locally, before moving to clubs in Europe.
That has changed today. Rising talents are hardly ever channeled through NPFL clubs. These players are usually now products of football academies who basically warehouse them until they either get opportunities with the national youth teams or clubs in far flung countries. It is a worrying trend because these players struggle, after being plucked from Africa before they are mature and put through the new cultures of European clubs and society. The success rate is not encouraging and too many of our brightest talents fall by the way side in the end. Even when they find some success, it is fleeting.
How many of our young talents have survived the European youth teams in the last ten years and gone on to play for top European clubs? We can pick out names like Kelechi Iheanacho and Isaac Success who are in the English and Spanish top-flights, we may add others like Moses Simon and I would give room for six more. For a country reported to be the fifth largest exporter of football talents, that is extremely poor return. Our players, it seems, are leaving our shores too early and too unprepared for life on the international stage.
I have in the past suggested that the League Management Company and the Nigeria Football Federation work together to ensure our players are funneled through the NPFL to the international stage. That way we all win. Our young talents get to develop their football skills at home where their interests will be of primary importance. Special young talents in our clubs, protected by referees, will bring a good number of our fans back. Nigerians would love to see the next big stars who have what it takes to be the next Kanu or the next Okocha. What we have today is a league seen to be full of ‘old’ players - those fans feel are not good enough for export and not good enough for our national teams. Fans do not want to watch those.
I think the LMC-NFF must device a means of discouraging what is basically a ‘human trafficking’ trade by greedy football agents. We actually shortchange ourselves when we sell off our best talents to European clubs without having top-flight experience in Nigeria. Think about it, we never get to enjoy watching our best young footballers slug it out at home these days. We wait and wait for years for them to break into the first teams of clubs in Europe, and God knows how many are broken along the way. Besides, agents and academies would make a lot more money selling the players through Nigerian clubs. Let us take the case of Iheanacho for example. He was reportedly sold for about 350,000 pounds. Of course there will be the add-ons, but so too for the Brazilian Kenedy at Chelsea, arguably no greater talent than Iheanacho – but who was reportedly sold for six and a half million pounds.
What we need to do in Nigeria is to curb age cheating in our football – the NFF has promised to tackle this scourge head on with new plans in the works – and ensure our players are vented through our clubs and not national youth teams. In the past I suggested starting an U-17 youth league for clubs in the NPFL. These youth teams would basically open games for their senior counterparts every match day. Beyond creating a platform for the continued development of these talents, an U-17 league would lead us to self-check solution for age cheating. Nigerian clubs fielding age cheats against themselves will be easily found out. It would also help if the NFF insists that only players from the youth leagues or Nigerian clubs can make the Golden Eaglets and Flying Eagles teams.
This would seriously discourage our propensity for churning out gifted, but immature talents for export. A guy like Iheanacho would probably have given Nigerians three years of entertaining football before being sold to a big club in Europe for millions of pounds. That would have been great for the NPFL, for our clubs, our national teams, as well as the player and his agents.
We also need to develop the Nigerian way of playing in modern day football, and that way has to be designed and perfected at home. Today our players leave to different countries before returning to the national teams with different philosophies of the game. It would not help that we have also found a quick-fix solution in scouring the earth for players of dual nationalities to bolster the Super Eagles.
These are players who think and act European but have to play African. I have not seen this tack win any laurels for any nation in Africa yet. Algeria are the best example, with their senior national team known to sometimes field as many as nine or ten foreign-born players. We wait to see how this shapes out, but I am not a fan, unless the player in question is of Messi-esque levels.
The purpose of this article is to put in perspective what our fight should be in the Nigeria as we aim to revive our football. If we want sustainable success we have to adopt ideas that first make our leagues and clubs successful so that we can have an endless conveyor belt rolling out quality talents that can then go the best clubs overseas and return to make the Super Eagles a true world beater.
Economically the NPFL can also attract ten times and over, the investments and sponsorships of the national teams. In the past I used an example from England to illustrate this point. Clubs like Manchester United alone attract better sponsorship than the English national teams. The same would be the case in Nigeria if we can make our leagues and clubs successful.
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