NFF’s Years Of Neglect: Why Finidi George Shouldn’t Bear The Blame For Nigeria’s Football Woes

OBI TRICE EMEKA 

My earliest memory of Nigerian football should be the 1994 World Cup game between Nigeria and Greece. I could remember telling my mother to wake me up to watch the match on our tiny black and white TV, which needed dexterity in antenna handling to provide any worthy visuals.

The 1994 World Cup was held in the USA, and the time zone ensured that you had to wake by early morning in Nigeria to watch the matches. It was Nigeria’s first World Cup, and an eight-year-old me was excited just like everyone else and made that sacrifice.

My next tournament was the 1996 Olympics, also hosted in the USA, and I expected we had to be awake to see Nigeria play Brazil and Argentina, the two matches I could remember watching. Since then, I have excitedly followed the Nigerian team and NFF in all its controversies.

There’s no competition that the Super Eagles and youth team played in that I didn’t follow. I have gone on a dry fast and have prayed fervently just to see the Super Eagles succeed.

Finidi George: A Golden Era Player

I could say that I witnessed the Golden Era of the Super Eagles and the NFF. Finidi George, who just resigned as the head coach of the Super Eagles, was an integral part of that era.

Finidi George was a winger who dominated the right flank. He would go on to win the Champions League with Ajax Amsterdam and other laurels in Spain and other parts of Europe I have always wondered where he was since he retired in mid-2000, till he resurfaced as the coach of Enyimba FC of Aba and later joined the coaching crew of the Super Eagles. In his playing days, he was quiet and avoided controversies.

Finidi George’s first two competitive games as the manager of the Nigerian national team have left the country on the verge of missing out on the 2026 World.

Finidi George, who replaced the Portuguese tactician Joseph Pesseiro as the coach of the Super Eagles met the Super Eagles placed 4th on the qualifying table and then moved them one step down to the fifth position after playing four matches.

Nigerian Football Fans and NFF desperately in search of who to blame have heaped the blame on Findi George, who has just had two competitive matches as the Super Eagles coach, drawing one and losing another. Interestingly, Nigeria is yet to win any match in the qualifiers before the arrival of Finidi George.

I do not think there’s any place in this world where a football manager is judged after two matches. Reforms are not easy. It takes a lot for a manager to instil in his team his playing strategy and mentality, hence, Finidi George can’t perform any miracle in two matches especially with many players still fatigued after a long competitive European season

Tactics and strategies are products of experimentation and not what is hurriedly done. I understand that Nigerian fans are desperate for success, but this desperation is a chief reason why Nigerian football has collapsed.

The Golden Era of Nigerian Football with the Finidi George class of 1994 World Cup players has ended and the Nigerian team has been performing below average ever since.

Nigeria has struggled to make an impact in international football. In 2006, Nigeria failed to qualify for the World Cup and managed to make it to the second round 14 years after with Stephen Keshi, a local coach at the helm. Coincidentally, Stephen Keshi also delivered our first Nations Cup victory after 1994.

The Current State of Nigerian Football

I stopped watching Nigerian Football after the end of the 2010 World Cup, where the NFF, in its usual pursuit of short-term objectives, refused to see that it was time to reorganise the team and plan for the longer term.

The year 2010 was about the year Nigeria knew the Golden Era had ended. Veteran Nigerian coach Shuaibu Amodu had qualified Nigeria for the World Cup and was sacked a few weeks before the World Cup and replaced by Lars Lagerback from Sweden.

I thought Lars did well in the tournament and deserved to lead the Super Eagles into a new era. The NFF did not see it that way.

One major problem with Nigerian development is its definition of its success criteria. Nigeria’s definition of success is always short-term hanging fruits which in the long term does not deliver the desired sustainable expectations. This is why we populate our age-group football competition with overaged players. We win the tournaments, but then, the bones of our players show their true age and can no longer continue to play, conferring any advantage to the senior team.

Pyrrhic victory

Football Development, just like any other development, requires articulate vision, persistence and efficiency in planning to deliver results. Success just doesn’t happen. It is years of hard work.

The NFF often diagnoses spasms of luck as witnessed in the Nations Cup in 2013 and the AFCON of 2024 as proof of doing the right thing, then slide into nothingness until we are laid bare as we are witnessing at the moment. Just as Nassem Taleb describes, the NFF has always been fooled by randomness.

The success of any national team is dependent on the growth and efficiency of its grassroots and age-group football teams. They are the feedstock for the national team.

National team players have less time for team bonding or adjusting to tactics and strategies, which means that the playing philosophy of that team must be developed at the age-group competitions and ingrained with the team/players as they move into the senior team.

The problem with Nigerian football is not Finidi George, local coaches, or foreign coaches. Those who think Nigerian coaches are the problem often forget that foreign coaches have also failed in Nigeria, and no foreign coach has done anything extraordinary that local coaches have not done.

Westerhof, our best foreign coach, won the Nations Cup and took us to the second round of the World Cup. Stephen Keshi replicated that.

The Nigerian football problem is the absence of long-term planning by the NFF to develop a national football philosophy and create grassroots programmes that begin to fit young players into this philosophy at an early stage, thus guaranteeing a succession of talents that understand what Nigerian football is.

It is not enough to go to Europe and pick random European players of Nigerian origin and include them in a team that has no playing philosophy and less time to develop one. The outcome would continue to be disjointed.

The Golden era Super Eagles were known for their counter-attacking abilities, playing a 4-3-3 flat formation, thus creating legends such as Finidi George, arguably Nigeria’s best right winger of all time.

I watched a few games of the last AFCON where Nigeria was the runner-up and my comment was that the Nigerian team was about the worst in the tournament with no playing philosophy and depended on good fortunes to win a match. Perhaps it is for this reason that they languished in the 4th position on the World Cup qualifying table.

Luck has its off days.

The Real Problem: NFF’s Years of Neglect

The job of the NFF is to chaperone Nigeria’s football in such a manner that it successfully meets defined success criteria. And, it is impossible to meet any success criteria without a plan.

In my three decades of following Nigeria football, the NFF has never inspired. It is always engulfed in one crisis or the other and has never shown any understanding of the time or what it takes to create an enduring soccer legacy.

The NFF has no development programme for Nigerian football, nor has it developed any playing philosophy for our various teams. They have simply left our football to float and deliver whatever accidental success it meets on its way.

The problem with Nigerian football is the NFF and its inability to invest in Nigerian football. The NFF gets a lot of funding from FIFA, its sponsors, and also the government who see Football as a basic amenity, yet the NFF can not say with certainty where all those funds go.

Grassroots football is dead. The NFF has no programmes targeted at generating the kind of players that will feed the Super Eagles. Our age-group competition is broken- there is no linkage between what successes we have at the age-group competition on our senior team, majorly because our age-group competitions are built on fraud, and the need to win at all costs.

The NFF also has no programmes that aim to continuously train grassroots coaches and improve their abilities to recruit and train new talents across the country.

Tactics and strategy form what we call a playing philosophy, and all these are ingrained at a young age at the grassroots. Countries that have succeeded in football on the world stage have a functioning supply chain of young players who replace and fit into the roles of ageing players.

In Africa, Senegal and South Africa are teaching us how to build a team by abhorring short-term wins and focusing on the long-term.

Spain and Belgium have shown it is impossible in Europe. I do not know of any serious football country that does have a defined football philosophy and strategies to invest to ingrain this strategy in all cadres and personnel of its football management.

The NFF’s inability to synchronise our grassroots football with the growth of the Super Eagles has ensured that players make it to the senior team with a poor understanding of tactics and strategy collectively creating a team with no playing philosophy other than raw talent and luck.

For Nigerian football to return and surpass its glory days, the NFF must do what Nigerians hate; long-term planning. It must find a tactically aware manager that is not going to be burdened with short-term successes and a director of football who understands football development. Both should be charged with developing a playing philosophy for the Nigerian Football teams and specify methodologies for ingraining this philosophy at the grassroots and age-group levels alongside requisite training for local coaches who would be charged to ensure the playing philosophy catches on.

Chukwuemeka Obi (Obi Trice) is a graduate of Agricultural Engineering and also has an M.Eng in Processing and Storage from the University of Ibadan