These are sad times in Nigerian football.
The events of the past two weeks have opened up a can of worms, plus the opportunity of a microscopic look beyond the superficiality of the incomprehensible drama.
Nigerian football is currently being white-washed and sun-dried in the global information superhighway.
Suddenly, nothing is right about Nigerian football, not even the seemingly improving domestic leagues, the steady growth of the women’s game, the explosion in the domestic football business, and the mushrooming of academies. All these have been set aside for the failure of the Super Eagles to win one simple football match at home against the weakest team ever to defeat them in history, a team annoyingly being coached by a foreign man rejected by Nigeria for taking Nigerian football back many decades. That singular defeat has also, now, taken Nigerian football development back several decades, nullifying even the small gains at AFCON 2023.
Worse still, the loss by the Super Eagles and the resignation of Finidi George, have both been dwarfed by the cursing and ranting (from ‘nowhere) of Victor Osimhen. It is now the most-talked about issue in the Nigerian football space, setting off mayhem in the football structure – what to do or not to do with Osimhen.
On the current billboard of Nigerian football are all the ugliness, the illegalities, the mediocrities, the injustices, the frailties, the failures in the system, everything in all their nakedness, tiworo tiworo! It is so bad that no one knows exactly what to make of it all, or how best to resolve the resultant issues.
Permit me to peer through my microscope into why in 5 short months, Nigerian football plunged from near the pinnacle of ultimate success to the dung of an unprecedented and most shameful defeat. What could have gone so drastically wrong?
The reality is that at the end of the day, it is the players and how they perform that determine the measure of success or failure of football administrations. When a team wins, everything is right. When a team loses, everything is wrong. It is as simple as that. There are no in-betweens.
Even the era of football administration in Nigeria that is often referred to as a model is only so rated because the Super Eagles played extremely well and won trophies for Nigeria in the early to mid-1990s. Inside the boardroom, at the time (I was a witness), it was also chaotic.
