WHY NOTHING WILL CHANGE IN SUPER EAGLES

By Biodun Alabi 

The hastiness of the conversations around Super Eagles’ current form and recent history, the anger, the sentiments and the emotions about the race to qualify for the 2026 world cup and next year’s AFCON outing, are like an ailment that is still missing diagnosis and cure.

The Eagles did not become Super overnight. The team did not evolve to become what it was in 1980 and in 1994 without undergoing a generational metamorphosis of slow and steady equation of elimination and subtraction in players and coaches.

The team that won AFCON in 1980 had elements of developments from the 1976 tournament in Ethiopia while the 1994 squad was a product of three years (1990 to 1993), under a manager who lived where he worked and built his team with the nuances of our game and our originality .

Fast forward to 1996, when we won the football gold in Atlanta, USA, that team was a ‘soup’ that had condiments from the under 17 world cup in 1993, a sprinkle of the 1994 AFCON and world cup team and a few players that emerged alongside, from both national and international competitions, between those periods.

However,  all these won’t have been without a strong and very competitive local league system which produced clubs that stood up to the dominance of North Africa who have the best record so far in Africa clubsides competitions. 

What European leagues simply did to our players from our own league then was to just polish the rough diamonds in them and gave them some global awareness and exposure of the game, yet our originality was not totally lost.

Alabi, a sports enthusiat writes from Abeokuta

This is what we took to 1994, 1998 and 2002 world cup finals and a few AFCON, held within the period, until our league football began to drop in quality and in management…and was totally eclipsed by European football migration and viewership. 

The success of late Stephen Keshi with the 2013 AFCON team in South Africa slightly followed this trajectory, which is why the golden boy of that tournament for Nigeria was a home-based player, Sunday Mbah.( How and why he quickly disappeared is another major issue).

Jose Peseiro and the current generation of players in the team are mere ‘showroom’, the crux of the problems facing the Eagles is general administration of the game….it has only, and usually climaxes with the team in times like this.

Nothing will change in the team,even under a world class manager, ( which we can’t afford anyway) as long as we continue attempting a short cut to the top. Morocco endured a quiet revolution and that’s the reason for what they are today…..smaller nations are also working hard on their originality in their own way, and that is why Lesotho,  Comoros Island, Central Africa Republic and Cape Verde will always shock Giants like Nigeria and Ghana.

The current generation of Eagles players are not originally Nigerian in in the nature and nurture perspectives of our game, yes they are Nigerians by blood, but without the crucible of playing the game from Ibadan to Abeokuta,  Akure, Warri, Kano, Lagos, Gombe, Jos and many more, they will remain in the class they belong and won’t ever be able to match the demands of this legendary team.

The best they could give will always be ‘an attempt to be’, 

One must commend the current league management body for taking some bold steps to bring the local game back, with some consistency in a few years to come, and with the NFF in sinc with what they are doing,  a new era may just be around the corner.

Alabi, a sports enthusiast writes from Abeokuta